Citizen Nation

For Monday 10/15 please read (or re-read) the Jeanette Wolfley article which was Wednesday’s reading, “Jim Crow, Indian Style” (if a link is ever broken like that again, someone please alert me!), as well as Keyssar, Right to Vote Chapters 5 and 6. On Monday we will discuss women’s suffrage campaign and how the right to vote for (mainly white) women was achieved in by 1920. Continue reading →

The next two class sessions both deal with colonized nations within the jurisdiction of the United States. Each of these nations or groups has 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 →

For Monday 10/1, read Good Citizen, Ch 4 and be prepared to discuss what “democracy” looked like by the end of the 19th century. 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 →

All women were omitted from many of the privileges of American citizenship, and some of them strenuously and articulately resisted. In addition, millions of women suffered under the double burden of being both female *and* enslaved. Even free white women used “slavery” as a way to talk about their legal predicament, and to advocate not only for abolition but for gender equality. Continue reading →

This week we’ve been focusing on the political culture and ideas of the founding generation in the late 18th century and the development of American democracy and how citizenship was experienced in the early 19th century. Continue reading →

For Wed 9/12, 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 represented whom and how? Continue reading →

For our next class on MONDAY 9/10: read Richard Bellamy, Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction and write a 2-3 page response paper considering some of these critical thinking questions; Continue reading →

This is the course website for “Citizen Nation” at Worcester State University in Fall 2012, which can be taken as History, Political Science, or Women’s Studies (as well as for Honors credit). I also used this website when I taught the course in the Spring 2012 term and I’ve left that course material up as an archive for the students in that semester. Continue reading →