Citizen Nation

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.