War and Citizenship

War and Citizenship
Author: Daniela L. Caglioti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2020-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108489427

Demonstrates how states at war redrew the boundaries between members and non-members, thus redefining belonging and the path to citizenship.

War, Citizenship, Territory

War, Citizenship, Territory
Author: Deborah Cowen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2024-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040277551

For all too obvious reasons, war, empire, and military conflict have become extremely hot topics in the academy. Given the changing nature of war, one of the more promising areas of scholarly investigation has been the development of new theories of war and war’s impact on society. War, Citizenship, Territory features 19 chapters that look at the impact of war and militarism on citizenship, whether traditional territorially-bound national citizenship or "transnational" citizenship. The editors argue that while there has been an explosion of work on citizenship and territory, Western academia’s avoidance of the immediate effects of war (among other things) has led them to ignore war, which they contend is both pervasive and well nigh permanent. This volume sets forth a new, geopolitically based theory of war’s transformative role on contemporary forms of citizenship and territoriality, and includes empirical chapters that offer global coverage.

Fighting for Citizenship

Fighting for Citizenship
Author: Brian Taylor
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469659786

In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War–era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights, goals that had eluded earlier generations of black veterans. Some, like Frederick Douglass, urged immediate enlistment to support the cause of emancipation, hoping that a Northern victory would bring about the end of slavery. But others counseled patience and negotiation, drawing on a historical memory of unfulfilled promises for black military service in previous American wars and encouraging black men to leverage their position to demand abolition and equal citizenship. In doing this, they also began redefining what it meant to be a black man who fights for the United States. These debates over African Americans' enlistment expose a formative moment in the development of American citizenship: black Northerners' key demand was that military service earn full American citizenship, a term that had no precise definition prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. In articulating this demand, Taylor argues, black Northerners participated in the remaking of American citizenship itself—unquestionably one of the war's most important results.

Obligations

Obligations
Author: Michael Walzer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1970
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674630253

In this collection of essays, Michael Walzer discusses how obligations are incurred, sustained, and (sometimes) abandoned by citizens of the modern state and members of political parties and movements as they respond to and participate in the most crucial and controversial aspects of citizenship: resistance, dissent, civil disobedience, war, and revolution. Walzer approaches these issues with insight and historical perspective, exhibiting an extraordinary understanding for rebels, radicals, and rational revolutionaries. The reader will not always agree with Walzer but he cannot help being stimulated, excited, challenged, and moved to thoughtful analysis.

Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen

Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen
Author: Peter Alexander Meyers
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2009-05-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0226522105

In this unique book, Peter Alexander Meyers leads us through the social processes by which shock incites terror, terror invites war, war invokes emergency, and emergency supports unchecked power. He then reveals how the domestic political culture created by the Cold War has driven these developments forward since 9/11, contending that our failure to acknowledge that this Cold War continues today is precisely what makes it so dangerous. With eloquence and urgency Meyers argues that the mantra of our time—“everything changed on 9/11!”—is false and pernicious. By contrast, Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen provides a novel account of long-term transformations in the citizen’s experience of war, the constitution of political powers, and public uses of communication, and from that firm historical basis explains how a convergence of these social facts became the pretext for unprecedented opportunism and irresponsibility after 9/11. Where others have observed that our rights are under attack, Meyers digs deeper and finds that today “government by the people” itself is at risk. Sparkling with historical and philosophical insight, this is a dramatic diagnosis of the American political scene that at once makes clear the new position of the citizen and the necessity for active citizenship if democracy is to endure.

Citizenship in Cold War America

Citizenship in Cold War America
Author: Andrea Friedman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Citizenship
ISBN: 9781625340672

Examines the boundaries and meanings of American citizenship during the early Cold War

Uncertain Ground

Uncertain Ground
Author: Phil Klay
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0593299256

From the National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment and Missionaries, an astonishing fever graph of the effects of twenty years of war in a brutally divided America. When Phil Klay left the Marines a decade ago after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself a part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences—for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war—from the revolutionary war of our founding, to the civil war that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. What did the current wars say about who we are as a country, and how should we respond as citizens? Unlike in previous eras of war, relatively few Americans have had to do any real grappling with the endless, invisible conflicts of the post-9/11 world; in fact, increasingly few people are even aware they are still going on. It is as if these wars are a dark star with a strong gravitational force that draws a relatively small number of soldiers and their families into its orbit while remaining inconspicuous to most other Americans. In the meantime, the consequences of American military action abroad may be out of sight and out of mind, but they are very real indeed. This chasm between the military and the civilian in American life, and the moral blind spot it has created, is one of the great themes of Uncertain Ground, Phil Klay’s powerful series of reckonings with some of our country’s thorniest concerns, written in essay form over the past ten years. In the name of what do we ask young Americans to kill, and to die? In the name of what does this country hang together? As we see at every turn in these pages, those two questions have a great deal to do with each another, and how we answer them will go a long way toward deciding where our troubled country goes from here.

German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era

German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era
Author: Alison Clark Efford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2013-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107031931

This study reframes Civil War-era history, arguing that the Franco-Prussian War contributed to a dramatic pivot in Northern commitment to African-American rights.

Recruiting for Uncle Sam

Recruiting for Uncle Sam
Author: David R. Segal
Publisher:
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1989
Genre: History
ISBN:

Which citizens have fought America's wars? Which ones should fight in the future, and how should they be recruited? Should military or other national service be an obligation for every citizen? David Segal's probing look at the complex issues behind these questions tells us much about the changing manpower needs of our armed forces and about the evolution of civil-military relations in the United States. Segal analyzes the mobilization, contributions, and limitations of drafted, reservist, and volunteer forces from the early days of the republic to the present. In the process, he shows how Americans have come to separate the benefits of citizenship from service to their country. Symptomatic of this separation is the current reliance on an all-volunteer military, a system that treats military service more as an occupation and opportunity for self-advancement than as a civic duty and obligation. Drawing on a vast interdisciplinary literature in American history, sociology, political science, and economics, Segal illuminates the ways demographics, weapons technology, international relations, scientific management, and social policies have all affected the composition of America's armed forces. He also shows how the military anticipated and expanded the American welfare system and played a pivotal role in creating better opportunities for minorities and women. The capabilities and performance of U.S. armed forces in future conflicts will depend on a thorough understanding of and informed response to the crucial manpower issues Segal discusses. His thoughtful study should be required reading for military professionals and policymakers and will be of interest to anyone concerned about the future of this country's armed forces.

The Citizenship Revolution

The Citizenship Revolution
Author: Douglas Bradburn
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2009-07-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813930316

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 "states," composed of "American citizens" began cobbling together a Union to fight their former fellow countrymen. But who was an American? What did it mean to be a "citizen" and not a "subject"? And why did it matter? Bradburn’s stunning reinterpretation requires us to rethink the traditional chronologies and stories of the American Revolutionary experience. He places battles over the meaning of "citizenship" 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 "Nation," but a "Union of States"—and 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 Revolution—a 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.