More than merely legal status, citizenship is also a form of belonging, shaping individual and group rights, duties, and identities. The pioneering essays in this volume are the first to address the evolution and significance of citizenship in the American South during the long nineteenth century. They explore the politics and contested meanings of citizenry from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in a tumultuous period when slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and segregation redefined relationships between different groups of southern men and women, both black and white.
William A. Link, Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida, is the author of Links: My Family in American History. David Brown, senior lecturer in American studies at the University of Manchester, is the coauthor of Race in the American South: From Slavery to Civil Rights. Brian Ward, professor of American Studies at Northumbria University, is the author of Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South. Martyn Bone, associate professor of American literature at the University of Copenhagen, is the author of The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction.