State and citizen
Subtitle: British America and the early United States
By: edited by Peter Thompson and Peter S. Onuf
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Charlottesville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 311
ISBN-13: 9780813933498; 9780813933504
Subjects: History; Citizenship; Political rights; The State
Description: Pointing the way to a new history of the transformation of British subjects into American citizens, State and Citizen challenges the presumption that the early American state was weak by exploring the changing legal and political meaning of citizenship. The volume's distinguished contributors cast new light on the shift from subjecthood to citizenship during the American Revolution by showing that the federal state played a much greater part than is commonly supposed. Going beyond master narratives - celebratory or revisionist - that center on founding principles, the contributors argue that geopolitical realities and the federal state were at the center of early American political development. The volume's editors, Peter Thompson and Peter S. Onuf, bring together political science and historical methodologies to demonstrate that citizenship was a political as well as a legal concept. The American state, this collection argues, was formed and evolved in a more dialectical relationship between citizens and government authority than is generally acknowledged. Suggesting points of comparison between an American narrative of state development - previously thought to be exceptional - and those of Europe and Latin America, the contributors break fresh ground by investigating citizenship in its historical context rather than by reference only to its capacity to confer privileges. -- Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: state and citizen in British America and the early United States / Peter S. Onuf; title: Subjects by allegiance to the king?: debating status and power for subjects; title: and Slaves; title: through the religious debates of the early British Atlantic / Holly Brewer; title: The laws of war and peace: legitimating slavery in the age of the American Revolution / Eliga H. Gould; title: "The great field of human Concerns": the states, the union, and the problem of citizenship in the era of the American Revolution / Douglas Bradburn; title: Bringing the state system back in: the significance of the union in early American history, 1763-1865 / David C. Hendrickson; title: "A mongrel kind of government": The U.S. Constitution, the federal union, and the origins of the American state / Max M. Edling; title: Patriarchal magistrates, associated improvers, and monitoring militias: visions of self-government in the early American republic, 1760-1840 /  John L. Brooke; title: Imagined economies: economic nationalism in the American and Confederate independence movements / John Majewski; title: State, nation, and citizen in the Confederate crucible of war / Paul Quigley; title: The enduring legacy of nineteenth-century governance in the United States: the emergence of the associative order / Brian Balogh.