Remaking the Republic - Christopher James Bonner

Remaking the Republic

Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship
Buch | Softcover
272 Seiten
2023
University of Pennsylvania Press (Verlag)
978-1-5128-2473-5 (ISBN)
24,90 inkl. MwSt
Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates observed that citizenship was "now as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government."

Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were, Christopher James Bonner argues, at the center of creating the very meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after Bates's lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations it imposed. They thus played a vital role in the long, fraught process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of that belonging.

Remaking the Republic chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newpsapers, state and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

Christopher James Bonner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland.

Introduction: Making Black Citizenship Politics

Chapter 1. An Integral Portion of This Republic

Chapter 2. "Union Is Strength": Building an American Citizenship

Chapter 3. Nations, Revolutions, and the Borders of Citizenship

Chapter 4. Runaways, or Citizens Claimed as Such

Chapter 5. Contesting the "Foul and Infamous Lie" of Dred Scott

Chapter 6. Black Politics and the Roots of Reconstruction

Epilogue: The Enduring Search for Home

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Erscheinungsdatum
Reihe/Serie America in the Nineteenth Century
Zusatzinfo 11 illus.
Verlagsort Pennsylvania
Sprache englisch
Maße 152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt Geisteswissenschaften Geschichte Regional- / Ländergeschichte
Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie
Sozialwissenschaften Politik / Verwaltung
Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie
ISBN-10 1-5128-2473-9 / 1512824739
ISBN-13 978-1-5128-2473-5 / 9781512824735
Zustand Neuware
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