The Citizenship Revolution

The Citizenship Revolution

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Most Americans believe that the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 marked the settlement of post-Revolutionary disputes over the meanings of rights, democracy, and sovereignty in the new nation. In The Citizenship Revolution, Douglas Bradburn undercuts this view by showing that the Union, not the Nation, was the most important product of independence. In 1774, everyone in British North America was a subject of King George and Parliament. In 1776 a number of newly independent qstates, q composed of qAmerican citizensq began cobbling together a Union to fight their former fellow countrymen. But who was an American? What did it mean to be a qcitizenq and not a qsubjectq? And why did it matter? Bradburnas stunning reinterpretation requires us to rethink the traditional chronologies and stories of the American Revolutionary experience. He places battles over the meaning of qcitizenshipq in law and in politics at the center of the narrative. He shows that the new political community ultimately discovered that it was not really a qNation, q but a qUnion of Statesqaand that it was the states that set the boundaries of belonging and the very character of rights, for citizens and everyone else. To those inclined to believe that the ratification of the Constitution assured the importance of national authority and law in the lives of American people, the emphasis on the significance and power of the states as the arbiter of American rights and the character of nationhood may seem strange. But, as Bradburn argues, state control of the ultimate meaning of American citizenship represented the first stable outcome of the crisis of authority, allegiance, and identity that had exploded in the American Revolutionaa political settlement delicately reached in the first years of the nineteenth century. So ended the first great phase of the American citizenship revolution: a continuing struggle to reconcile the promise of revolutionary equality with the pressing and sometimes competing demands of law, order, and the pursuit of happiness.aothello, a aessay on negro slavery, no. ... There are numerous problems with such a thesis, not least of which is that William smith, one of the strongest defenders of slavery, was also a leading advocate for assumption, and that madisonanbsp;...

Title:The Citizenship Revolution
Author: Douglas Bradburn
Publisher:University of Virginia Press - 2009-07-13



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