Research Guides: AAS 37300: History of Injustice in America: American Citizenship

American Citizenship: Who is a Citizen of the United States of America?

American Citizenship

Who is a citizen of the United States of America? Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1:1.2 Citizenship Clause Doctrine

From congress.gov / information current as of 24 January 2025

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services: Learn About Citizenship

Click the hyperlink above to view information from USCIS.gov

An official website of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

"The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plays a central role in administering the immigration system of the United States."

Administration of immigration benefits is the responsibility of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

In order to have a liaison between the public and DHS on immigration benefits matters, Congress created the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which operates independently from USCIS.

Approaches to American Citizenship as a Research Topic

Immigration and Naturalization
- This approach is rich with information, especially for citizens born in the U.S. to parents who were also born in the U.S.
14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868) from the National Archives
- "Passed by Congress June 13, 1866, and ratified July 9, 1868, the 14th Amendment extended liberties and rights granted by the Bill of Rights to formerly enslaved people."
Indigenous and Native Americans
Voting as a civic duty of U.S. Citizenship
Do incarcerated individuals retain the full benefits of American citizenship?
- What rights of citizenship do incarcerated Americans lose or risk losing upon release?
How and why does Military Service connect to American citizenship?
How has the definition of whiteness changed throughout the history of the U.S.?
What changes have taken place between the 1970s and the 1990s in terms of Mexican citizens' ability to move freely between Mexico and the U.S.?

Print books in Purdue WL campus Libraries

The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander; Cornel West (Introduction by)
Call Number: HSSE - 2nd floor ; HV9950 .A437 2012

Publication Date: 2012 edition

In a bold and innovative argument, a rising legal star shows readers how the mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of black men amounts to a devastating system of racial control. This is a terrifying reality that exists in the UK as much as in the US. Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, the system that once forced African-Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts and the criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and deprives an entire segment of the population of their basic rights.
These Truly Are the Brave an anthology of African American writings on war and citizenship Author by A. Yęmisi Jimoh (Editor); Françoise N. Hamlin (Editor)
Call Number: HSSE - 3rd floor LC ; PS508.N3 T46 2015

Publication Date: 2018

QBR Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Nonfiction - Finalilst From enslaved people who joined Washington's Continental Army to Buffalo Soldiers in the Indian Wars, from the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II to black men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, African Americans have been an integral part of the country's armed forces?even while the nation questioned, challenged, and denied their rights, and oftentimes their humanity. These Truly Are the Brave collects three centuries of poems, stories, plays, songs, essays, pamphlets, newspaper articles, speeches, oral histories, letters, and political commentaries, richly contextualizing them within their specific historical moments. This anthology offers perspectives on war, national loyalty, and freedom from a sweeping range of writers including Phillis Wheatley, James Weldon Johnson, Natasha Trethewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Vievee Francis, Michael S. Harper, Ann Petry, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more.
Half American: the epic story of African Americans fighting World War II at home and abro by Matthew F. Delmont
Call Number: HSSE - 2nd floor ; D810.B53 D45 2022

Publication Date: 2022

The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, written by civil rights expert and Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont. Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored.

eBooks

These People Have Always Been a Republic: indigenous electorates in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, 1598-1912 by Maurice S. Crandall
Call Number: eBook

Publication Date: 2019

Single user access: only 1 person can view at a time
Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall?s sweeping history of Native American political rights in what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power.
An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by Kyle T. Mays
Call Number: eBook

Publication Date: 2022

eBook should be available/activated 28 or 29 January 2025. See url above for direct link when activated.
The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America.
Citizenship and Assimilation Grant Program fact sheet. by Fact Sheet from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services -- Office of Policy and Strategy, issuing body
Publication Date: 2017

Electronic resource: Click on "US Government Documents" for full text
Becoming American under Fire : Irish Americans, African Americans, and the politics of citizenship during the Civil War era by Christian G. Samito
Call Number: eBook

Publication Date: 2011

In Becoming American under Fire, Christian G. Samito provides a rich account of how African American and Irish American soldiers influenced the modern vision of national citizenship that developed during the Civil War era. By bearing arms for the Union, African Americans and Irish Americans exhibited their loyalty to the United States and their capacity to act as citizens; they strengthened their American identity in the process. Members of both groups also helped to redefine the legal meaning and political practices of American citizenship.
The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Alexander, Michelle, author; West, Cornel, writer of foreword
Publication Date: Tenth anniversary edition. New York : The New Press. 2020
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS): Operations and Issues for Congress (R48021) [2024] by Operations and Issues for Congress Kandel, William A.
Call Number: Online report

Publication Date: 2024

U.S. Congressional Document
Trumpism, Mexican America, and the Struggle for Latinx Citizenship by Phillip B. Gonzales (Editor); Renato Rosaldo (Editor); Mary Louise Pratt (Editor)
Call Number: eBook

Publication Date: 2021

For Latinx people living in the United States, Trumpism represented a new phase in the long-standing struggle to achieve a sense of belonging and full citizenship. Throughout their history in the United States, people of Mexican descent have been made to face the question of how they do or do not belong to the American social fabric and polity. This volume situates this new phase in relation to what went before, and it asks what new political possibilities emerged from this dramatic chapter in our history.
What Can U. S. Government Information Do for Me? by Tom Diamond (Editor); Dominique Hallett (Editor)
Call Number: eBook

Publication Date: 2023

The United States government is one of the world's largest publishers, printing and distributing a wealth of information including resources on American history, crime and justice data, contextualized government images, census data, genealogy research and much more.

Chapter, "Department of State and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services"
Part V: Military
Part VI: Native American
U. S. Citizenship for Dummies by Jennifer Gagliardi
Call Number: eBook

Publication Date: 2022

For American citizens born in the U.S., the process of becoming a U.S. citizen can seem labyrinthine. Understanding what it takes to become a U.S. citizen is a complicated process made simpler to understand by this book.

"Become a U.S. immigration wiz with this hands-on and practical guide to U.S. citizenship In U.S. Citizenship For Dummies, expert citizenship and ESL instructor Jennifer Gagliardi walks you through the ins and outs of the complicated process of obtaining citizenship in the United States... U.S. Citizenship For Dummies is the perfect guide to the procedural and substantive knowledge you need to understand the American immigration system."
The Practice of Citizenship: Black politics and print culture in the early United States by Derrick R. Spires
Call Number: eBook

Publication Date: 2019

In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does.

American Citizenship: Print Books in the BCC Library

IndiVisible: African-Native American lives in the Americas by Gabrielle Tayac (Editor)
Call Number: BCC ; E184.A1 I463 2009

Publication Date: 2009

Throughout American history, people of combined African and Native American descent have often struggled for acceptance, not only from dominant cultures but also from their own communities. In this collection of twenty-seven groundbreaking essays, authors from across the Americas explore the complex personal histories and contemporary lives of people wth a dual heritage that has rarely received attention as part of the multicultural landscape.
The Third Reconstruction: America's struggle for racial justice in the twenty-first century by Peniel E. Joseph
Call Number: BCC ; E185.615 .J678 2022

Publication Date: 2022

One of our preeminent historians of race and democracy argues that the period since 2008 has marked nothing less than America's Third Reconstruction... America's first and second Reconstructions fell tragically short of their grand aims. Our Third Reconstruction offers a new chance to achieve Black dignity and citizenship at last--an opportunity to choose hope over fear.
Inherently Unequal the betrayal of equal rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903 by Lawrence Goldstone
Call Number: BCC ; KF4757 .G655 2011

Publication Date: 2011

A potent and original examination of how the Supreme Court subverted justice and empowered the Jim Crow era. In the following years following the Civil War, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery; the 14th conferred citizenship and equal protection under the law to white and black; and the 15th gave black American males the right to vote. In 1875, the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the nation's history granted all Americans "the full and equal enjoyment" of public accomodations. Just eight years later, the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 vote, overturned the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional and, in the process, disemboweled the equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment. Using court records and accounts of the period, Lawrence Goldstone chronicles how "by the dawn of the 20th century the U.S. had become the nation of Jim Crow laws, quasi-slavery, and precisely the same two-tiered system of justice that had existed in the slave era." The very human story of how and why this happened make Inherently Unequal as important as it is provocative. Examining both celebrated decisions like Plessy v. Ferguson and those often overlooked, Goldstone demonstrates how the Supreme Court turned a blind eye to the obvious reality of racism, defending instead the business establishment and status quo--thereby legalizing the brutal prejudice that came to definite the Jim Crow era.
Torchbearers of Democracy: African American soldiers and the era of the First World War by Chad L. Williams
Call Number: BCC ; D639.N4 W497 2010

Publication Date: 2010

Also available as an eBook.

For the 380,000 African American soldiers who fought in World War I, Woodrow Wilson's charge to make the world "safe for democracy" carried life-or-death meaning. Chad L. Williams reveals the central role of African American soldiers in the global conflict and how they, along with race activists and ordinary citizens, committed to fighting for democracy at home and beyond.
The Tuskegee Airmen: an illustrated history, 1939-1949 by Daniel Haulman; Joseph D. Caver; Jerome Ennels
Call Number: BCC ; D790.252 332nd .C37 2011

Publication Date: 2011

Many documentaries, articles, museum exhibits, books, and movies have now treated the subject of the Tuskegee Airmen, the only black American military pilots in World War II. Most of these works have focused on their training and their subsequent accomplishments during combat. This publication goes further, using captioned photographs to trace the Airmen through the various stages of training, deployment, and combat in North Africa, Italy, and over occupied Europe. Included for the first time are depictions of the critical support roles of non-flyers: doctors, nurses, mechanics, navigators, weathermen, parachute riggers, and others, all of whom contributed to the Airmen's success. In words and pictures, this volume makes vivid the story of the Tuskegee Airmen and the environments in which they lived, worked, played, fought, and sometimes died.