Download or read book The Development of American Citizenship 1608 1870 written by James H. Kettner and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: he concept of citizenship that achieved full legal form and force in mid-nineteenth-century America had English roots in the sense that it was the product of a theoretical and legal development that extended over three hundred years. This prize-winning volume describes and explains the process by which the cirumstances of life in the New World transformed the quasi-medieval ideas of seventeenth-century English jurists about subjectship, community, sovereignty, and allegiance into a wholly new doctrine of "volitional allegiance." The central British idea was that subjectship involved a personal relationship with the king, a relationship based upon the laws of nature and hence perpetual and immutable. The conceptual analogue of the subject-king relationship was the natural bond between parent and child. Across the Atlantic divergent ideas were taking hold. Colonial societies adopted naturalization policies that were suited to practical needs, regardless of doctrinal consistency. Americans continued to value their status as subjects and to affirm their allegiance to the king, but they also moved toward a new understanding of the ties that bind individuals to the community. English judges of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assumed that the essential purpose of naturalization was to make the alien legally the same as a native, that is, to make his allegiance natural, personal, and perpetual. In the colonies this reasoning was being reversed. Americans took the model of naturalization as their starting point for defining all political allegiance as the result of a legal contract resting on consent. This as yet barely articulated difference between the American and English definition of citizenship was formulated with precision in the course of the American Revolution. Amidst the conflict and confusion of that time Americans sought to define principles of membership that adequately encompassed their ideals of individual liberty and community security. The idea that all obligation rested on individual volition and consent shaped their response to the claims of Parliament and king, legitimized their withdrawal from the British empire, controlled their reaction to the loyalists, and underwrote their creation of independent governments. This new concept of citizenship left many questions unanswered, however. The newly emergent principles clashed with deep-seated prejudices, including the traditional exclusion of Indians and Negroes from membership in the sovereign community. It was only the triumph of the Union in the Civil War that allowed Congress to affirm the quality of native and naturalized citizens, to state unequivocally the primacy of the national over state citizenship, to write black citizenship into the Constitution, and to recognize the volitional character of, the status of citizen by formally adopting the principle of expatriation.-->

Download or read book American Citizenship written by Judith N. Shklar and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this illuminating look at what constitutes American citizenship, Judith Shklar identifies the right to vote and the right to work as the defining social rights and primary sources of public respect. She demonstrates that in recent years, although all profess their devotion to the work ethic, earning remains unavailable to many who feel and are consequently treated as less than full citizens.

Download or read book Diversity and Citizenship written by Gary J. Jacobsohn and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1996 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lectures presented as part of the celebration of the bicentennial of the founding of Williams College.

Download or read book Nationals Abroad written by Christopher A. Casey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a fundamental term of the social contract that people trade allegiance for protection. In the nineteenth century, as millions of people made their way around the world, they entangled the world in web of allegiance that had enormous political consequences. Nationality was increasingly difficult to define. Just who was a national in a world where millions lived well beyond the borders of their sovereign state? As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, jurists and policymakers began to think of ways to cut the web of obligation that had enabled world politics. They proposed to modernize international law to include subjects other than the state. Many of these experiments failed. But, by the mid-twentieth century, an international legal system predicated upon absolute universality and operated by intergovernmental organizations came to the fore. Under this system, individuals gradually became subjects of international law outside of their personal citizenship, culminating with the establishment of international courts of human rights after the Second World War.

Download or read book Frontiers of Equality in the Development of EU and US Citizenship written by Jeremy B. Bierbach and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a framework for comparing EU citizenship and US citizenship as standards of equality. If we wish to understand the legal development of the citizenship of the European Union and its relationship to the nationalities of the member states, it is helpful to examine the history of United States citizenship and, in particular, to elaborate a theory of ‘duplex’ citizenships found in federal orders. In such a citizenship, each person’s citizenship is necessarily ‘layered’ with the citizenship or nationality of a (member) state. The question this book answers is: how does federal citizenship, as a claim to equality, affect the relationship between the (member) state and its national or citizen? Because the book places equality, not allegiance to a sovereign at the center of its analysis of citizenship, it manages to escape traditional analyses of the EU that measure it by the standard of a sovereign state. The text presents a coherent account of the development of EU citizenship and EU civil rights for those who wish to understand their continuing development in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Scholars and legal practitioners of EU law will find novel insights in this book into how EU citizenship works, in order to be able to grasp the direction in which it will continue to develop. And it may be of great interest to American scholars of law and political science who wish to understand one aspect of how the EU works as a constitutional order, not merely as an order of international law, by comparison to their own history. Jeremy Bierbach is an attorney at Franssen Advocaten in Amsterdam. He holds a Ph.D. in European constitutional law from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Download or read book The Paradox of Citizenship in American Politics written by Mehnaaz Momen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This remarkable book does the unusual: it embeds its focus in a larger complex operational space. The migrant, the refugee, the citizen, all emerge from that larger context. The focus is not the usual detailed examination of the subject herself, but that larger world of wars, grabs, contestations, and, importantly, the claimers and resisters.”— Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, USA This thought-provoking book begins by looking at the incredible complexities of “American identity” and ends with the threats to civil liberties with the vast expansion of state power through technology. A must-read for anyone interested in the future of the promise and realities of citizenship in the modern global landscape.— Kevin R. Johnson, Dean, UC Davis School of Law, USA Momen focuses on the basic paradox that has long marked national identity: the divide between liberal egalitarian self-conception and persistent practices of exclusion and subordination. The result is a thought-provoking text that is sure to be of interest to scholars and students of the American experience. — Aziz Rana, Professor of Law, Cornell Law School, USA This book is an exploration of American citizenship, emphasizing the paradoxes that are contained, normalized, and strengthened by the gaps existing between proposed policies and real-life practices in multiple arenas of a citizen’s life. The book considers the evolution of citizenship through the journey of the American nation and its identity, its complexities of racial exclusion, its transformations in response to domestic demands and geopolitical challenges, its changing values captured in immigration policies and practices, and finally its dynamics in terms of the shift in state power vis-à-vis citizens. While it aspires to analyze the meaning of citizenship in America from the multiple perspectives of history, politics, and policy, it pays special attention to the critical junctures where rhetoric and reality clash, allowing for the production of certain paradoxes that define citizenship rights and shape political discourse.

Download or read book The Pacific Insular Case of American S moa written by Line-Noue Memea Kruse and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a researched study of land issues in American Sāmoa that analyzes the impact of U.S. colonialism and empire building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Carefully tracing changes in land laws up to the present, this volume also draws on a careful examination of legal traditions, administrative decisions, court cases and rising tensions between indigenous customary land tenure practices in American Sāmoa and Western notions of individual private ownership. It also highlights how unusual the status of American Sāmoa is in its relationship with the U.S., namely as the only “unincorporated” and “unorganized” overseas territory, and aims to expand the U.S. empire-building scholarship to include and recognize American Sāmoa into the vernacular of Americanization projects.

Download or read book Civic Longing written by Carrie Hyde and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Constitutional definition of citizenship existed until the 14th Amendment in 1868. Carrie Hyde looks at the period between the Revolution and the Civil War when the cultural and juridical meaning of citizenship was still up for grabs. She recovers numerous speculative traditions that made and remade citizenship’s meaning in this early period.

Download or read book The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship written by Paul D. Quigley and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2018-06-04 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The meanings and practices of American citizenship were as contested during the Civil War era as they are today. By examining a variety of perspectives—from prominent lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to enslaved women, from black firemen in southern cities to Confederate émigrés in Latin America—The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship offers a wide-ranging exploration of citizenship’s metamorphoses amid the extended crises of war and emancipation. Americans in the antebellum era considered citizenship, at its most basic level, as a legal status acquired through birth or naturalization, and one that offered certain rights in exchange for specific obligations. Yet throughout the Civil War period, the boundaries and consequences of what it meant to be a citizen remained in flux. At the beginning of the war, Confederates relinquished their status as U.S. citizens, only to be mostly reabsorbed as full American citizens in its aftermath. The Reconstruction years also saw African American men acquire—at least in theory—the core rights of citizenship. As these changes swept across the nation, Americans debated the parameters of citizenship, the possibility of adopting or rejecting citizenship at will, and the relative importance of political privileges, economic opportunity, and cultural belonging. Ongoing inequities between races and genders, over the course of the Civil War and in the years that followed, further shaped these contentious debates. The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship reveals how war, Emancipation, and Reconstruction forced the country to rethink the concept of citizenship not only in legal and constitutional terms but also within the context of the lives of everyday Americans, from imprisoned Confederates to former slaves.

Download or read book Americanization and Integration of Immigrants written by U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book American Citizenship and Constitutionalism in Principle and Practice written by Steven F. Pittz and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions at the very heart of the American experiment—about what the nation is and who its people are—have lately assumed a new, even violent urgency. As the most fundamental aspects of American citizenship and constitutionalism come under ever more powerful pressure, and as the nation’s politics increasingly give way to divisive, partisan extremes, this book responds to the critical political challenge of our time: the need to return to some conception of shared principles as a basis for citizenship and a foundation for orderly governance. In various ways and from various perspectives, this volume’s authors locate these principles in the American practice of citizenship and constitutionalism. Chapters in the book’s first part address critical questions about the nature of U.S. citizenship; subsequent essays propose a rethinking of traditional notions of citizenship in light of the new challenges facing the country. With historical and theoretical insights drawn from a variety of sources—ranging from Montesquieu, John Adams, and Henry Clay to the transcendentalists, Cherokee freedmen, and modern identitarians—American Citizenship and Constitutionalism in Principle and Practice makes the case that American constitutionalism, as shaped by several centuries of experience, can ground a shared notion of American citizenship. To achieve widespread agreement in our fractured polity, this notion may have to be based on “thin” political principles, the authors concede; yet this does not rule out the possibility of political community. By articulating notions of citizenship and constitutionalism that are both achievable and capable of fostering solidarity and a common sense of purpose, this timely volume drafts a blueprint for the building of a genuinely shared political future.

Download or read book Beyond Citizenship written by Peter J. Spiro and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American identity has always been capacious as a concept but narrow in its application. Citizenship has mostly been about being here, either through birth or residence. The territorial premises for citizenship have worked to resolve the peculiar challenges of American identity. But globalization is detaching identity from location. What used to define American was rooted in American space. Now one can be anywhere and be an American, politically or culturally. Against that backdrop, it becomes difficult to draw the boundaries of human community in a meaningful way. Longstanding notions of democratic citizenship are becoming obsolete, even as we cling to them. Beyond Citizenship charts the trajectory of American citizenship and shows how American identity is unsustainable in the face of globalization. Peter J. Spiro describes how citizenship law once reflected and shaped the American national character. Spiro explores the histories of birthright citizenship, naturalization, dual citizenship, and how those legal regimes helped reinforce an otherwise fragile national identity. But on a shifting global landscape, citizenship status has become increasingly divorced from any sense of actual community on the ground. As the bonds of citizenship dissipate, membership in the nation-state becomes less meaningful. The rights and obligations distinctive to citizenship are now trivial. Naturalization requirements have been relaxed, dual citizenship embraced, and territorial birthright citizenship entrenched--developments that are all irreversible. Loyalties, meanwhile, are moving to transnational communities defined in many different ways: by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, and sexual orientation. These communities, Spiro boldly argues, are replacing bonds that once connected people to the nation-state, with profound implications for the future of governance. Learned, incisive, and sweeping in scope, Beyond Citizenship offers a provocative look at how globalization is changing the very definition of who we are and where we belong.

Download or read book Citizenship written by Peter J. Spiro and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost everyone has citizenship, and yet it has emerged as one of the most hotly contested issues of contemporary politics. Even as cosmopolitan elites and human rights advocates aspire to some notion of "global citizenship," populism and nativism have re-ignited the importance of national citizenship. Either way, the meaning of citizenship is changing. Citizenship once represented solidarities among individuals committed to mutual support and sacrifice, but as it is decoupled from national community on the ground, it is becoming more a badge of privilege than a marker of equality. Intense policy disagreement about whether to extend birthright citizenship to the children of unauthorized immigrants opens a window on other citizenship-related developments. At the same time that citizenship is harder to get for some, for others it is literally available for purchase. The exploding incidence of dual citizenship, meanwhile, is moving us away from a world in which states jealously demanded exclusive affiliation, to one in which individuals can construct and maintain formal multinational identities. Citizenship does not mean the same thing to everyone, nor have states approached citizenship policy in lockstep. Rather, global trends point to a new era for citizenship as an institution. In Citizenship: What Everyone Needs to Know®, legal scholar Peter J. Spiro explains citizenship through accessible terms and questions: what citizenship means, how you obtain citizenship (and how you lose it), how it has changed through history, what benefits citizenship gets you, and what obligations it extracts from you--all in comparative perspective. He addresses how citizenship status affects a person's rights and obligations, what it means to be stateless, the refugee crisis, and whether or not countries should terminate the citizenship of terrorists. He also examines alternatives to national citizenship, including sub-national and global citizenship, and the phenomenon of investor citizenship. Spiro concludes by considering whether nationalist and extremist politics will lead to a general retreat from state-based forms of association and the end of citizenship as we know it. Ultimately, Spiro provides historical and critical perspective to a concept that is a part of our everyday discourse, providing a crucial contribution to our understanding of a central organizing principle of the modern world.

Download or read book The American Kaleidoscope written by Lawrence H. Fuchs and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize (1991) Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Award from the Immigration History Society (1993) Do recent changes in American law and politics mean that our national motto — e pluribus unum — is at last becoming a reality? Lawrence H. Fuchs searches for answers to this question by examining the historical patterns of American ethnicity and the ways in which a national political culture has evolved to accommodate ethnic diversity. Fuchs looks first at white European immigrants, showing how most of them and especially their children became part of a unifying political culture. He also describes the ways in which systems of coercive pluralism kept persons of color from fully participating in the civic culture. He documents the dismantling of those systems and the emergence of a more inclusive and stronger civic culture in which voluntary pluralism flourishes. In comparing past patterns of ethnicity in America with those of today, Fuchs finds reasons for optimism. Diversity itself has become a unifying principle, and Americans now celebrate ethnicity. One encouraging result is the acculturation of recent immigrants from Third World countries. But Fuchs also examines the tough issues of racial and ethnic conflict and the problems of the ethno-underclass, the new outsiders. The American Kaleidoscope ends with a searching analysis of public policies that protect individual rights and enable ethnic diversity to prosper. Because of his lifelong involvement with issues of race relations and ethnicity, Lawrence H. Fuchs is singularly qualified to write on a grand scale about the interdependence in the United States of the unum and the pluribus. His book helps to clarify some difficult issues that policymakers will surely face in the future, such as those dealing with immigration, language, and affirmative action.

Download or read book Before the Movement The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights written by Dylan C. Penningroth and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement. The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn’t join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement. In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these “rights of everyday use,” Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself—the laws all of us live under today. Penningroth’s narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story—their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life—a vision allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”

Download or read book Expelling the Poor written by Hidetaka Hirota and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Présentation de l'éditeur: "Expelling the Poor' argues that immigration policies in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts, driven by cultural prejudice against the Irish and more fundamentally by economic concerns about their poverty, laid the foundations for American immigration control."

Download or read book Racial Classification and History written by E. Nathaniel Gates and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1997 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the concept of "race" The term "race," which originally denoted genealogical or class identity, has in the comparatively brief span of 300 years taken on an entirely new meaning. In the wake of the Enlightenment it came to be applied to social groups. This ideological transformation coupled with a dogmatic insistence that the groups so designated were natural, and not socially created, gave birth to the modern notion of "races" as genetically distinct entities. The results of this view were the encoding of "race" and "racial" hierarchies in law, literature, and culture. How "racial" categories facilitate social control The articles in the series demonstrate that the classification of humans according to selected physical characteristics was an arbitrary decision that was not based on valid scientific method. They also examine the impact of colonialism on the propagation of the concept and note that "racial" categorization is a powerful social force that is often used topromote the interests of dominant social groups. Finally, the collection surveys how laws based on "race" have been enacted around the world to deny power to minority groups. A multidisciplinary resource This collection of outstanding articles brings multiple perspectives to bear on race theory and draws on a wider ranger of periodicals than even the largest library usually holds. Even if all the articles were available on campus, chances are that a student would have to track them down in several libraries and microfilm collections. Providing, of course, that no journals were reserved for graduate students, out for binding, or simply missing. This convenient set saves students substantial time and effort by making available all the key articles in one reliable source. Authoritative commentary The series editor has put together a balanced selection of the most significant works, accompanied by expert commentary. A general introduction gives important background informationand outlines fundamental issues, current scholarship, and scholarly controversies. Introductions to individual volumes put the articles in context and draw attention to germinal ideas and major shifts in the field. After reading the material, even a beginning student will have an excellent grasp of the basics of the subject. Also available individually by volume, 1. The Concept of "Race" in Natural and Social Science (0-8153-2600-9) 288 pages. 2. Cultural and Literary Critiques of the Concepts of "Race" (0-8153-2601-7) 3. Racial Classification and History (0-8153-2602-5) 4. The Judicial Isolation of the "Racially" Oppressed (0-8153-2599-1)