Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States

This book offers a new paradigm of liberal selfhood and citizenship from the founding of the United States through the 1920s.

Barbara Young Welke (Author)

9780521152259, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 8 March 2010

256 pages, 1 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 1.4 cm, 0.3 kg

'This is a short book with big ideas … powerful analysis leaves no doubt that significant shifts occurred within American legal history, and Welke's interpretive framework … will be pivotal in shaping future inquiries.' Lucy Salyer, American Historical Review

For more than a generation, historians and legal scholars have documented inequalities at the heart of American law and daily life and exposed inconsistencies in the generic category of 'American citizenship'. Welke draws on that wealth of historical, legal, and theoretical scholarship to offer a new paradigm of liberal selfhood and citizenship from the founding of the United States through the 1920s. Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States questions understanding this period through a progressive narrative of expanding rights, revealing that it was characterized instead by a sustained commitment to borders of belonging of liberal selfhood, citizenship, and nation in which able white men's privilege depended on the subject status of disabled persons, racialized others, and women. Welke's conclusions pose challenging questions about the modern liberal democratic state that extend well beyond the temporal and geographic boundaries of the long-nineteenth-century United States.

Introduction
1. Constructing a universal legal person: able white manhood
2. Subjects of law: disabled persons, racialized others, and women
3. Borders: resistance, defense, structure, and ideology
Conclusion: abled, racialized, and gendered power in the making of the twentieth-century American state
Coda.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]