Citizen Sailors

Citizen Sailors PDF Author: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674915550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
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.

Citizen Sailors

Citizen Sailors PDF Author: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674915550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
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.

Citizen Sailors

Citizen Sailors PDF Author: Richard Howard Gimblett
Publisher: Dundurn
ISBN: 1554888670
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This commemorative volume records a special kind of dual citizenship: Canadians exercising the profession of the sea in their nation's service, while also living out their civilian occupations in their home communities. The perspectives of these citizen sailors provide an interesting, valuable, and timely alternative history of the Canadian Navy.

Moral Contagion

Moral Contagion PDF Author: Michael A. Schoeppner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110846999X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
During the Antebellum era, thousands of free black sailors were arrested for violating the Negro Seamen Acts. In retelling the harrowing experiences of free black sailors, Moral Contagion highlights the central roles that race and international diplomacy played in the development of American citizenship.

Ready Then. Ready Now. Ready Always

Ready Then. Ready Now. Ready Always PDF Author: David Frank Winkler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692327654
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Ready Then, Ready Now, Ready Always: More than a Century of Service by Citizen Sailors coincides with the centennial anniversary of the U.S. Navy Reserve on March 3, 2015. However, as the title indicates, American's have been leaving their civilian occupations since the birth of the Navy in 1775 to serve the nation at sea during times of crises. This well illustrated narrative aims to tell about the contributions of those civilians to the nation's defense and security. Besides providing a broad chronology covering how citizen Sailors served as privateers, naval militiamen, National Naval Volunteers, Naval Reservists, and finally simply as Sailors as part of a one Navy concept, the author elected to follow numerous individuals on their journeys in the Navy Reserve as representative stories of the millions of Americans who once wore Navy blue part-time. By highlighting the contributions of these individuals, the intent is to honor all who served in the USNR as well as salute their families for their service to country.

Birthright Citizens

Birthright Citizens PDF Author: Martha S. Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107150345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Explains the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship provision, as a story of black Americans' pre-Civil War claims to belonging.

Citizen Warriors

Citizen Warriors PDF Author: Stephen M. Duncan
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This text concentrates on the how and why of criminal law, how and why does behaviour become, or stop, being criminal? Issues considered include fraud, squatting, sexual offences and drug use.

School of Hard Knots

School of Hard Knots PDF Author: Henry H. Abernathy, Jr.
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
ISBN: 9781475142495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
As a citizen sailor of the late 1960's I spent three eventful years aboard a US Navy destroyer, the USS Furse (DD-882) including intensive operations in Vietnam as well as in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in over 150,000 Nautical miles at sea. Those three years stand out as the most intense and formative of my adult life. Among the events I witnessed were running aground, colliding with another ship, being hit by enemy fire, and a murder on board. But many everyday challenges and events loom equally large for what they taught me about myself and about human nature in our tightly packed and tight-knit shipboard community. Letters written home almost every day along with declassified logs from the ship provide a window into life aboard a Navy destroyer. Re-entry to civilian life at the height of the Vietnam war illuminates these turbulent times as well as what citizen soldiers/sailors faced in that era.

The Republic Afloat

The Republic Afloat PDF Author: Matthew Taylor Raffety
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226924009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In the years before the Civil War, many Americans saw the sea as a world apart, an often violent and insular culture governed by its own definitions of honor and ruled by its own authorities. The truth, however, is that legal cases that originated at sea had a tendency to come ashore and force the national government to address questions about personal honor, dignity, the rights of labor, and the meaning and privileges of citizenship, often for the first time. By examining how and why merchant seamen and their officers came into contact with the law, Matthew Taylor Raffety exposes the complex relationship between brutal crimes committed at sea and the development of a legal consciousness within both the judiciary and among seafarers in this period. The Republic Afloat tracks how seamen conceived of themselves as individuals and how they defined their place within the United States. Of interest to historians of labor, law, maritime culture, and national identity in the early republic, Raffety’s work reveals much about the ways that merchant seamen sought to articulate the ideals of freedom and citizenship before the courts of the land—and how they helped to shape the laws of the young republic.

Diary of a Contraband

Diary of a Contraband PDF Author: William Benjamin Gould
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804747080
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
The heart of this book is the remarkable Civil War diary of the author’s great-grandfather, William Benjamin Gould, an escaped slave who served in the United States Navy from 1862 until the end of the war. The diary vividly records Gould’s activity as part of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron off the coast of North Carolina and Virginia; his visits to New York and Boston; the pursuit to Nova Scotia of a hijacked Confederate cruiser; and service in European waters pursuing Confederate ships constructed in Great Britain and France. Gould’s diary is one of only three known diaries of African American sailors in the Civil War. It is distinguished not only by its details and eloquent tone (often deliberately understated and sardonic), but also by its reflections on war, on race, on race relations in the Navy, and on what African Americans might expect after the war. The book includes introductory chapters that establish the context of the diary narrative, an annotated version of the diary, a brief account of Gould’s life in Massachusetts after the war, and William B. Gould IV’s thoughts about the legacy of his great-grandfather and his own journey of discovery in learning about this remarkable man.

The Citizenship Experiment

The Citizenship Experiment PDF Author: René Koekkoek
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004416455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The Citizenship Experiment explores the fate of citizenship ideals in the Age of Revolutions. While in the early 1790s citizenship ideals in the Atlantic world converged, the twin shocks of the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolutionary Terror led the American, French, and Dutch publics to abandon the notion of a shared, Atlantic, revolutionary vision of citizenship. Instead, they forged conceptions of citizenship that were limited to national contexts, restricted categories of voters, and ‘advanced’ stages of civilization. Weaving together the convergence and divergence of an Atlantic revolutionary discourse, debates on citizenship, and the intellectual repercussions of the Terror and the Haitian Revolution, Koekkoek offers a fresh perspective on the revolutionary 1790s as a turning point in the history of citizenship.