Nakel Nikiema
The United States tells its founding as a story of opportunity. The documents of 1607 to 1877 tell a narrower story: a republic that kept rewriting the list of who counted.The Unfinished Republic, Volume I follows that list from first colonial settlement through Reconstruction. Nakel Nikiema begins with Native nations already on the land, then the Atlantic slave trade, indenture, and the colonial codes that turned belonging into property. He reads the Revolution’s double language of liberty and bondage, the Naturalization Act of 1790, the expansion of slavery, and antebellum nativism. The book ends when the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments produced a second founding-and when those amendments were already under attack.This is not a history of the twentieth century. Internment, the Chinese Exclusion Act as a national regime, and the modern immigration-enforcement state belong to later volumes. Volume I stays with the instruments that drew the line: treaties, slave codes, naturalization statutes, fugitive-slave acts, and the Reconstruction amendments. Official papers are set beside petitions, runaway ads, and the smaller body of first-person narrative that survived.For readers who want the founding myth checked against the record.Ingram (short description, about 350 characters)A history of who could claim the United States from first colonial settlement through Reconstruction. Nakel Nikiema reads treaties, slave codes, the Naturalization Act of 1790, and the Reconstruction amendments against the founding story of opportunity. Volume I of The Unfinished Republic.Subtitle: Roots of Contradiction: Migration, Slavery, and the American ProjectAuthor: Nakel NikiemaPublisher: B.I.M. CorporationEdition: Second edition, 2026BISAC: HIS036000 (History / United States / General); HIS036040 (History / United States / 19th Century); SOC031000 (Social Science / Discrimination)
