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.

The book endeavors to establish the standards for vesting citizenship, in the hope that applying these standards will result in every person being granted citizenship of the State which is the center of his/her life. The author considers the connection between loyalty to the State and citizenship; the principles which should shape the concept of loyalty to the State; the dilemma of multiple citizenship and the right to citizenship in the light of current political changes. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

Gözde Yazıcı Cörüt unfolds the details of everyday life and represents the local people as active agents – active, moreover, in relation both to the changing nature and effectiveness of the Ottoman state's assertion of territorial authority and also to the differences between policies and practices of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Overall, she focuses on the end-of-empire border politics and the issue of Ottoman citizenship not only from the perspective of macro-level political developments and central state power but also in terms of the peripheral specificities of administration and the movements and subjecthood choices of people inhabiting the Russo-Ottoman borderland. The author presents a new type of multi-faceted account of borderland development in which ethnoreligious considerations came to inform a somewhat messy production of sovereignty in the context of the modernizing transition between empire and nation-state.

Drawing on Kant, Rousseau, and Habermas, Stilz argues that we owe civic obligations to the state if it is sufficiently just, and that constitutionally enshrined principles of justice in themselves are grounds for obedience to our particular state and for democratic solidarity with our fellow citizens.