Citizen Nation

On Thursday 9/15 our class will focus on the Constitution, and on the “Constitutional moment,” i.e. the era and cultural milieu in which it was framed. Your reading is Chapter 2 of Schudson’s Good Citizen and also the full text of the US Constitution. You’ll want to bring both of these items to class, if possible. The Constitution can be found in the back of any US history textbook you have on hand, or you can print a copy from the web, or download it as a mobile app onto your phone.

Discussion Questions:

Are voting rights natural or granted?
Should citizenship be linked to the right to vote?
Why the electoral college system?
Where / how often does the Constitution mention the words “citizen” or “citizenship”?

Thursday’s soapbox speakers are Dean and Kristen

Reminders:
1) please complete the citizenship exam & send screenshot by Friday 9/9 — see post below for details
2) email Dr. Hangen if you are willing to give a soapbox speech on Thurs 9/15 — I need 6 brave volunteers — see Soapbox tab above — I’ll explain more about this in Tuesday’s class and pass around a signup sheet

For Tues 9/13 we move from a generic, conceptual definition of citizenship to (in Bellamy’s terms) a more empirical examination of actual citizenship in the American colonies and early republic. Who could be a citizen? Who was deemed capable of consenting? Who actually represented whom and how?

The reading is Chapter 1 in both our two textbooks, Alexander Keyssar’s The Right to Vote and Michael Schudson’s The Good Citizen. If you don’t yet have the books, those chapters are available as PDF files in Blackboard. You will immediately notice that while they cover similar time periods, each has a quite different focus. Keyssar is concerned primarily with the narrower right to vote within the umbrella of citizenship exclusions and requirements, while Schudson is less interested in how the boundaries of citizenship were drawn and more interested in political practices broadly defined, and on what constitutes “good” citizenship in the past.

Discussion Questions:
What myths did these readings “bust” for you?
Who was eligible to vote in colonial America (where, and under what circumstances)? Specifically– why and how was suffrage limited before the 1780s?
Where might historians disagree (i.e. where are the fracture lines in these two scholarly arguments)?
How “democratic” was colonial politics?

If you’re able, bring the books to class, or take good notes and bring your notes.

For Sept 6 in class:

Leno’s Citizenship Test (pre-2009)

Myths about migration to US (On The Media, July 2016)

Somalis in Maine (August 2016)

The Electoral College (New York Times, 2012)

How Much do Americans Know About Immigration? (Washington Post, Sept 2016)

Links & resources to explore before Thurs Sept 8 class:

Take the 100-question US Citizenship Quiz – do this before Thursday, WITHOUT looking up answers & email me a screenshot of your results = thangen@worcester.edu

Voter Registration
Find Your US Senator / Representative
Find your MA Senator / Representative
Voter ID Laws, State by State
Massachusetts Redistricting Info
FAQs about the Electoral College
National Popular Vote Campaign

Reminder: Sept 8, a 2-3 page response paper is due on the Bellamy Citizenship book. Bring the paper to class as a printed paper (staples and everything!), don’t email it to me. We will discuss the entire book in class, please read it using the discussion questions I handed out as a guide, and bring the book to class ready for a lively discussion.

Over the next several class periods, we are looking at what happened with citizenship and civil rights from the 1960s to the present. Remember this was a complex movement, or really – a set of overlapping movements – with different strategies, constituencies, and histories. It cannot be reduced to a few key figures or events, and it did not end with the 1960s or even in the 1970s. So it helps to think about the civil rights revolution as unresolved, unfinished, and ongoing, and as part of a shared American history no matter your background. Continue reading →

I recommend you spend at least 1 hour exploring some of these links and resources to help you understand this important episode, and considering how it relates to the history of American citizenship in the 20th century: Continue reading →

Our class for Tues 11/4 has light reading but will be a hands-on workshop with some sources and materials for understanding the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Continue reading →

Some web/video links for additional context. Continue reading →

Thanks to our guests from US-CIS‘s Lawrence Field Office last Thursday (who forged ahead with their presentation despite the power outage), we have a better sense of the current immigration and naturalization process. Continue reading →

The next several class sessions deal with colonized nations within the jurisdiction of the United States. These nations or groups have claim to American citizenship, although that claim has been at times historically contested, hard-won, or tenuous. We will explore these different experiences and histories and compare them to one another. Continue reading →

When the Constitution was first established and ratified, slaves were counted as less than full persons for purposes of representation in our government. To be precise, each was 3/5 of a person. This “compromise,” as it is often called, was created (of course) without the consent or input of enslaved people, as a way to balance power and apportionment between slave and free, large and small states at the time of the Constitutional convention. Continue reading →