The Constitution has governed the United States since 1789, but many Americans are not aware of the structural rules that govern the oldest democracy in the world. Important public policy challenges require a knowledgeable, interested citizenry able to address the issues that represent the rich pageantry of American society. Issues such as climate change, national debt, poverty, pandemics, income inequality, and more can be addressed sufficiently if citizens play an active role in their own republic. Collectively, citizens are vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation if we place limits on our individual political knowledge. A more informed, engaged citizenry can best rise to the great policy challenges of contemporary society and beyond. Brian L. Fife provides readers with essential information on all aspects of American politics, showing them how to use political knowledge to shape the future of the republic. Activist citizens are the key to making the United States a more vibrant democracy. Fife equips citizens and would-be citizens with the tools and understanding they need to engage fully in the political process. At the end of each chapter, he analyzes why citizenship matters and how citizens can use that chapter’s material in their own lives. Fife also provides readers with a citizen homework section that presents web links to further explore issues raised in each chapter.

This is the story of how Americans attempted to define what it meant to be a citizen of the United States, at a moment of fracture in the republic's history. As Erik Mathisen demonstrates, prior to the Civil War, American national citizenship amounted to little more than a vague bundle of rights. But during the conflict, citizenship was transformed. Ideas about loyalty emerged as a key to citizenship, and this change presented opportunities and profound challenges aplenty. Confederate citizens would be forced to explain away their act of treason, while African Americans would use their wartime loyalty to the Union as leverage to secure the status of citizens during Reconstruction. In The Loyal Republic, Mathisen sheds new light on the Civil War, American emancipation, and a process in which Americans came to a new relationship with the modern state. Using the Mississippi Valley as his primary focus and charting a history that traverses both sides of the battlefield, Mathisen offers a striking new history of the Civil War and its aftermath, one that ushered in nothing less than a revolution in the meaning of citizenship in the United States.

Most Americans believe that the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 marked the settlement of post-Revolutionary disputes over the meanings of rights, democracy, and sovereignty in the new nation. In The Citizenship Revolution, Douglas Bradburn undercuts this view by showing that the Union, not the Nation, was the most important product of independence. In 1774, everyone in British North America was a subject of King George and Parliament. In 1776 a number of newly independent "states," composed of "American citizens" began cobbling together a Union to fight their former fellow countrymen. But who was an American? What did it mean to be a "citizen" and not a "subject"? And why did it matter? Bradburn’s stunning reinterpretation requires us to rethink the traditional chronologies and stories of the American Revolutionary experience. He places battles over the meaning of "citizenship" in law and in politics at the center of the narrative. He shows that the new political community ultimately discovered that it was not really a "Nation," but a "Union of States"—and that it was the states that set the boundaries of belonging and the very character of rights, for citizens and everyone else. To those inclined to believe that the ratification of the Constitution assured the importance of national authority and law in the lives of American people, the emphasis on the significance and power of the states as the arbiter of American rights and the character of nationhood may seem strange. But, as Bradburn argues, state control of the ultimate meaning of American citizenship represented the first stable outcome of the crisis of authority, allegiance, and identity that had exploded in the American Revolution—a political settlement delicately reached in the first years of the nineteenth century. So ended the first great phase of the American citizenship revolution: a continuing struggle to reconcile the promise of revolutionary equality with the pressing and sometimes competing demands of law, order, and the pursuit of happiness.

This refreshed and dynamic Eighth Edition of Keeping the Republic revitalizes the twin themes of power and citizenship by adding to the imperative for students to navigate competing political narratives about who should get what, and how they should get it. The exploding possibilities of the digital age make this task all the more urgent and complex. Christine Barbour and Gerald Wright, the authors of this bestseller, continue to meet students where they are in order to give them a sophisticated understanding of American politics and teach them the skills to think critically about it. The entire book has been refocused to look not just at power and citizenship but at the role that control of information and its savvy consumption play in keeping the republic.

"This is a book in African American history. It is about African Americans' efforts to define citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States. The definition of citizenship in the Constitution is vague, and African Americans used that ambiguity to claim specific rights, thereby crafting the definition of citizenship for all Americans"--

Stranger Citizens examines how foreign migrants who resided in the United States gave shape to citizenship in the decades after American independence in 1783. During this formative time, lawmakers attempted to shape citizenship and the place of immigrants in the new nation, while granting the national government new powers such as deportation. John McNelis O'Keefe argues that despite the challenges of public and official hostility that they faced in the late 1700s and early 1800s, migrant groups worked through lobbying, engagement with government officials, and public protest to create forms of citizenship that worked for them. This push was made not only by white men immigrating from Europe; immigrants of color were able to secure footholds of rights and citizenship, while migrant women asserted legal independence, challenging traditional notions of women's subordination. Stranger Citizens emphasizes the making of citizenship from the perspectives of migrants themselves, and demonstrates the rich varieties and understandings of citizenship and personhood exercised by foreign migrants and refugees. O'Keefe boldly reverses the top-down model wherein citizenship was constructed only by political leaders and the courts. Thanks to generous funding from the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the Mellon Foundation the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Present-day Americans feel secure in their citizenship: they are free to speak up for any cause, oppose their government, marry a person of any background, and live where they choose—at home or abroad. Denaturalization and denationalization are more often associated with twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. But there was a time when American-born and naturalized foreign-born individuals in the United States could be deprived of their citizenship and its associated rights. Patrick Weil examines the twentieth-century legal procedures, causes, and enforcement of denaturalization to illuminate an important but neglected dimension of Americans' understanding of sovereignty and federal authority: a citizen is defined, in part, by the parameters that could be used to revoke that same citizenship. The Sovereign Citizen begins with the Naturalization Act of 1906, which was intended to prevent realization of citizenship through fraudulent or illegal means. Denaturalization—a process provided for by one clause of the act—became the main instrument for the transfer of naturalization authority from states and local courts to the federal government. Alongside the federalization of naturalization, a conditionality of citizenship emerged: for the first half of the twentieth century, naturalized individuals could be stripped of their citizenship not only for fraud but also for affiliations with activities or organizations that were perceived as un-American. (Emma Goldman's case was the first and perhaps best-known denaturalization on political grounds, in 1909.) By midcentury the Supreme Court was fiercely debating cases and challenged the constitutionality of denaturalization and denationalization. This internal battle lasted almost thirty years. The Warren Court's eventual decision to uphold the sovereignty of the citizen—not the state—secures our national order to this day. Weil's account of this transformation, and the political battles fought by its advocates and critics, reshapes our understanding of American citizenship.