Focus Question: What has been the changing history and meaning of citizenship in the United States?

 

 

Photo shows new citizens taking the Oath of Allegiance

 

Topics on the Page
Becoming an American Citizen

 
The Citizenship Test

 
History of People Becoming Citizens

• Immigration Gateways and Ports of Entry

 

• European Citizenship
• European Immigration Before the Civil War

 

• African American Citizenship
• Post Civil War African American Civil Rights
  

 

• Asian American Citizenship 
• Chinese Immigration to the United States

 

• Native American Citizenship

 

• Mexican American Citizenship
• Mexican Immigration to the United States

 

• Puerto Rican Citizenship

 

• Muslim Immigration to the United States
  

 

Citizenship in the 21st Century

 

  Centuries of Citizenship:  A Constitutional Timeline:  1787 to present

 

 

Becoming an American Citizen

Citizenship consists in sharing a political community, and enjoying the benefits and assuming the political responsibilities
that give effect to this experience of shared political community.

In citizenship law, the two most important legal tools traditionally used to determine citizenship are:

1. Birthplace, or jus soli, the fact of being born in a territory over which the state maintains, has maintained, or wishes to extend its sovereignty.
2. Bloodline, or jus sanguinis, citizenship as a result of the nationality of one parent or of other, more distant ancestors.

 

All nations use jus soli and jus sanguinis in defining attribution of citizenship at birth. However, two other tools are used in citizenship law, attributing citizenship after birth through naturalization:

1. Marital status, in that marriage to a citizen of another country can lead to the acquisition of the spouse's citizenship.
2. Past, present, or future residence within the country's past, present, future, or intended borders (including colonial borders); citizenship assessment

 

Citizenship as distinguished by:
a. Cultural Citizenship
b. Naturalization

How to Become an American Citizen from Department of Homeland Security

To be a citizen at birth you must:

• be born in the United States or in certain territories or outlying possessions of the United States and be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; 

OR

• have a parent or parents who are citizens at the time of your birth (if you were born abroad).
• and meet other requirements

To become a citizen after birth, you must:

• apply for “derived” or “acquired” citizenship through parents
• apply for naturalization

Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America

 

Citizenship and Participation Lesson Plans, iCivics

 

 

Refugees/Asylum Lesson Plan

 

 

Teaching About Refugees, UNHCR, United Nations Refugee Agency 

 

 

Teaching Immigration with the Immigrant Stories Project, The Advocates for Human Rights

 

 

 

 

Citizenship Test

Click here for selections from the U. S. government's citizenship quiz with the option of taking only a sampling of questions.

 

• See also Flunking Civics: Why American Kids Know So Little that includes a civics quiz on the streets of Chicago in 2011, from the American Bar Association Journal.

Civic Literacy Exam from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Average score among American adults was 49%.

Who Deserves to be Called an American Citizen? Annalise Orleck, Dartmouth College

 

Honorary Citizens of the United States

 

 

European Immigration

1790 Alien Naturalization Act

• Stated only a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof,"

 

African American Citizenship

 

How Many Slaves Landed in the U.S.?  from 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro, Henry Louis Gates, The African Americans

 

Data Analysis:  African Americans on the Eve of the Civil War

14th and 15th Amendments

14th amendment and citizenship from the Library of Congress

 

• 14th Amendment to the Constitution
• This amendment granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included former slaves recently freed. 

 

• In addition, it forbids states from denying any person "life, liberty or property, without due process of law" or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

African Americans Face and Fight Obstacles to Voting

 

 

Asian American Citizenship

Searching Chinese immigrants for opium, San Francisco, 1876

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

Chinese Immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Acts

The Chinese Exclusion Act

The Chinese Exclusion Act: Primary Documents

 

 

 

Native American Citizenship

 

President Calvin Coolidge with four Osage Indians after Coolidge signed

the bill granting Indians full citizenship

 

Native Americans did not gain citizenship until 1924

 

U. S. Indian Policy Timeline

 Click here for Native American Citizenship Activities, 1900-1924

 

Indian Citizenship Act of 1924

 

 

Congress Grants Citizenship to all Native Americans Born in the U. S., June 24, 1924

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image from University of Houston Law Center

 

Mexican American Citizenship

America's Forgotten History of Mexican-American Repatriation, Fresh Air, NPR, September10, 2015

• With a scarcity of jobs during the Depression, more than a million people of Mexican descent were sent to Mexico; 60 percent with U.S. citizens

Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, 2006

Hernandez V. Texas (1954)

 

• Purposeful exclusion on Mexican-Americans from jury service violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment
• Remembering Hernandez v. Texas

 

Jenniffer Gonzalez

 

Puerto Rican Citizenship

The Jones Act (1917)

• Puerto Ricans Gained U.S. Citizenship, March 2, 1917

Puerto Ricans can carry U.S.passports, enter the mainland freely, but cannot vote for President

In 2016, Jenniffer Gonzalez was elected the first woman Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico

Citizenship in 21st Century

For writing by teachers and students about citizenship in the 21st century, visit an online exhibit from the National Council for the Social Studies in the National Gallery of Writing.

Click here for an article regarding a speech given by President Obama on his definition of citizenship


Go here for an Outline of the requirements for being a resident of Massachusetts

Click for a lesson plan, including essays and other resources on "Promoting Active Citizenship"

 

 

 


Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in other group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions.

Government is the organization, machinery, or agency through which a political unit exercises its authority, controls and administers public policy, and directs and controls the actions of its members or subjects.















a. Source Citation: Weil, Patrick. "Citizenship: Naturalization." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Ed. Maryanne Horowitz. Vol. 1. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005. 339-341. 6 vols. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. Smith College. 7 Apr. 2009
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b. Source Citation: "Citizenship." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Ed. Maryanne Horowitz. Vol. 1. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005. 335. 6 vols. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. Smith College. 7 Apr. 2009
<http://find.galegroup.com/gvrl/infomark.do? &contentSet=EBKS &type=retrieve &tabID=T001 &prodId=GVRL &docId=CX3424300114 &source=gale &userGroupName=mlin_w_smithcol &version=1.0>.