"Janet Polasky unearths an unappreciated history of the experience of asylum in Europe and the United States since the Age of the Democratic Revolutions. Facing squarely the destruction of asylum in our own time, she ends with a stunningly optimistic vision of a path toward its reconstruction."--Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies

Driven from their homelands, refugees from ancient times to the present have sought asylum in worlds turned upside down. Theirs is an age-old story. So too are the solutions to their plight. Historian Janet Polasky looks at the asylum freely offered in a revolutionary era when refugees sought shelter among emerging nation-states intent on securing their borders.

This book reclaims the lost story of refugees and of the vulnerable communities that harbored them in the first modern refugee crisis. In the wake of the American and French Revolutions, thousands of men and women took to the roads and waterways on both sides of the Atlantic in search of their inalienable rights. Although larger nations fortified their borders and circumscribed citizenship, two port cities, German Hamburg and Danish Altona, opened their doors, as did the federated Swiss cantons and the newly independent Belgian monarchy. The refugees thrived and the societies prospered. The United States followed, not only welcoming waves of immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century but offering them citizenship. In this remarkable story, Polasky shows how open doors can be a viable alternative to the building of border walls.