Colonial Origins and Legacies
by admin - September 11th, 2012
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?
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.
Bring the books to class, or take good notes and bring your notes.
