HISTS24

The American Revolution may have created a new nation of citizens out of a piece of the British Empire, but the exact contours of American citizenship remained ambiguous and contested. Who decided membership in this nation of citizens? Who qualified for citizenship and who did not, and upon what grounds? What rights and obligations, if any, were inherent in citizenship? This course examines how various groups of people answered these questions – in courtrooms, legislative halls, the popular press, and even the quotidian interactions of everyday people – over the course of the nineteenth century. The course pays particular attention to how race (as an ideological construct) and racialized peoples affected the development of American citizenship.