Excerpt from The Rights and Duties of American Citizenship The purpose of the present work is to present to American youths practical information as to the rights and duties which attach to American citizenship. In the effort to do this in the clearest and most logical form, the stereotyped method of giving a running commentary upon the Constitution has been discarded. Of all political forms, the federal type is the most complex; and it is, therefore, little short of absurd to attempt, as do so many text-books on Civics, to explain to students who are without previous training the constitutional relations of our elaborate system of national, state, and local governments, without first giving to them a knowledge of the nature of political authority, the purposes for which it exists, and the general governmental means through which such purposes are attained. In the present work it is believed that this error has been avoided. The student is first given that information which is essential to an understanding of citizenship and government in general, before he is called upon to study the description of our own complex government in particular. This book is therefore divided into two parts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Collection of essays tracing the historical evolution of African American experiences, from the dawn of Reconstruction onward, through the perspectives of sociology, political science, law, economics, education and psychology. As a whole, the book is a systematic study of the gap between promise and performance of African Americans since 1865. Over the course of thirty-four chapters, contributors present a portrait of the particular hurdles faced by African Americans and the distinctive contributions African Americans have made to the development of U.S. institutions and culture. --From publisher description.

Ernst Hirsch Ballin discusses the significance of citizens’ rights against the backdrop of ongoing migration and urbanization in the beginning of the 21st century. The traditional view that each state has the sovereign power to give or withhold citizenship, puts the full enjoyment of human rights at risk whenever exclusion is based on differences in nationality. Citizens’ rights are the essential connecting link between human rights and life in a democratic society. Citizens have an individual right, as a citizen, to take part in the democratic process and in the structures of solidarity of the state where they are effectively at home. By recognizing everyone’s right to the citizenship of the state in which they can make these rights a reality, citizens’ rights can bridge the gap between the universality of human rights and the changing political and social settings of people’s lives. Limits on dual citizenship are counterproductive, European citizenship paves the way for transnational citizenship. "Hirsch Ballin's book is very important for academics and practitioners in the field of citizenship. It embraces the complexity of citizenship with all its academic, practical and emotional meanings. Hopefully, Hirsch Ballin's work can serve as a compass for new directions in immigration and naturalisation debates." Katja Swider in: Journal of European Integration, Vol 38. nr. 4, 2016

In the decades after the United States formally declared its independence in 1776, Americans struggled to gain recognition of their new republic and their rights as citizens. None had to fight harder than the nation’s seamen, whose labor took them far from home and deep into the Atlantic world. Citizen Sailors tells the story of how their efforts to become American at sea in the midst of war and revolution created the first national, racially inclusive model of United States citizenship. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal immerses us in sailors’ pursuit of safe passage through the ocean world during the turbulent age of revolution. Challenged by British press-gangs and French privateersmen, who considered them Britons and rejected their citizenship claims, American seamen demanded that the U.S. government take action to protect them. In response, federal leaders created a system of national identification documents for sailors and issued them to tens of thousands of mariners of all races—nearly a century before such credentials came into wider use. Citizenship for American sailors was strikingly ahead of its time: it marked the federal government’s most extensive foray into defining the boundaries of national belonging until the Civil War era, and the government’s most explicit recognition of black Americans’ equal membership as well. This remarkable system succeeded in safeguarding seafarers, but it fell victim to rising racism and nativism after 1815. Not until the twentieth century would the United States again embrace such an inclusive vision of American nationhood.

As US power grew after WWI, officials and nonprofits joined to promote citizen participation in world affairs. David Allen traces the rise and fall of the Foreign Policy Association, a public-education initiative that retreated in the atomic age, scuttling dreams of democratic foreign policy and solidifying the technocratic national security model.