In the first page of this work the author describes its agenda as follows: “Rather than a comprehensive history of the passport in the United States, this book provides a loose chronology that follows the passport from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, through its critical transition from something like a letter of introduction to a certificate of citizenship to an identification document.” Apt words. This book demonstrates how profoundly the US passport has changed—in appearance, in the steps leading to its issuance, in the information it conveys, and above all in its uses by travelers and governments—since the early years of the republic. Not much besides the name of the document has remained the same since the first were issued.

Craig Robinson is also right to suggest that his work does not represent an effort to create any sort of logically complete picture of its subject. The work is organized around themes and episodes. The reader is almost reminded of a picaresque novel, in which the main character encounters one unexpected or unaccountable adventure after another. The reader would do better to appreciate the elements of this work for themselves, rather than seek a unifying, analytical message.

Today, international travelers think reflexively of their passports as sine qua non for travel across international boundaries—and as the trigger for rigorous and critical attention by the authorities monitoring both sides of carefully policed border crossings. For many of us, the passport is the most authoritative identification document that we own, carefully designed to make it apparent that we are indeed the person to whom the document was issued, and that the facts about us set down there are authoritative. But these expectations of passports, and of the state bureaucracies that issue and rely on them, are recent arrivals on the historical stage.

American passports through the middle of the nineteenth century were discursive (and not closely substantiated) testimonials to the good character of travelers, based largely on their local reputations. Indeed, the issuance and use of the document reflected what historian Alan Nevins called the “invertebrate” character of authority in this country at the time—the relative lack of development of central government and the scarcity of its representatives or, indeed, any other institutions of national reach. Standards for issuance were extremely loose by today's criteria. Secretaries of state relied rather little on documentary identification, of which little was available, and much on the travelers' local reputation. The parties making use of the passport were rarely the US authorities but, rather, officials of other countries, whose good offices were sought to smooth the way for American travelers. The document itself was more a genteel greeting from the secretary of state than a bureaucratically actionable basis for state decision making.

All this worked well enough, Robertson observes, so long as the bearers of passports remained—as they originally were—well-to-do white males. Typically, a single passport was issued to the head of the family, with wife and children included as part of a package.

America was changing, however, and its hierarchies would not remain the same forever. Well before the Civil War, free blacks began to apply for passports, triggering debate on some highly sensitive issues—above all, whether passport issuance was warranted for such persons, whose status (or lack of same) as American citizens was of course a salient controversy of the period. The debates ended only with passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866.

Then there was the question of how to deal with the immigrants who arrived in increasing numbers as the nineteenth century wore on. These travelers typically arrived without passports, often documented only en masse. They were subjected to physical inspection to detect disease or infirmity, and the minority ultimately sent back were rejected mainly on those grounds, rather than because of documentation or the lack of it. But immigration was a hot issue in the United States for much of this time—with special skepticism directed at immigrants from China. How, then, was the United States to deal with immigrants from that country who wanted to travel back to their countries of origins, and then return by right to their lives in the United States? Here, the documentation efforts and border controls became more rigorous and intrusive, with great concern to ensure that permission to return to the United States was not sold or otherwise passed on to other immigrants besides those to whom the documents were issued.

Times of war also produced more rigorous uses of the passport, if only temporarily. In the Civil War, Robertson reports, passports were used to screen males departing from this country, to determine that they were not subject to conscription for military service. World War I saw another tightening of passport issuance and passport checking at borders. By this point, those directing America's state apparatus had conceived the need for documentary control over the movements both of American nationals and foreigners into this country—which meant distinguishing US citizens from others, and visitors from immigrants. The result, as the twentieth century wore on, was intensification of requirements for documentary identification from US passport applicants.

Robertson is particularly effective at conveying the indignation felt, and widely articulated, by upper-crust Americans as they found themselves subject to hard-headed interviewing and processing by passport authorities—and especially their distaste at being treated, as they saw it, in ways more appropriate for criminals, immigrants, and other low-status groups. One can only wonder what their response would be to the “naked machines” used to process travelers through security lines in twenty-first-century US airports.

There is a lot of useful and intriguing material like this in The Passport in America, but the work is uneven. The author seems to have browsed at length through the historical record, setting down accounts of those bits that struck him as most engaging, regardless of their analytical relation to one another. There are excurses on such matters as the willingness of Americans to accept printed money and the verification of handwriting, neither of which struck this reader as closely linked to passports issues. And the writing often sags. “The emergence of the passport as a document used by officials and the public,”, he writes “makes explicit that who could document official identity, or the social or institutional purposes for which it was documented—indeed the very nature of citizenship or nationality as a documented identity—were all subject to historical contingencies” (p. 120). There are too many flabby sentences like these, which seem to be offered in place of informative generalizations.

This is a book that meanders through nearly two centuries of history, rather than charting a direct course to a clearly sighted destination. The readers are left to weigh for themselves the implications of the changes charted here for larger theoretical concerns, such as the changing nature of the state. But the work offers much food for such thought on such questions.