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.

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.

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: 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.

A diverse group of contributors offer different perspectives on whether or not the different experiences of our military and the broader society amounts to a "gap"—and if the American public is losing connection to its military. They analyze extensive polling information to identify those gaps between civilian and military attitudes on issues central to the military profession and the professionalism of our military, determine which if any of these gaps are problematic for sustaining the traditionally strong bonds between the American military and its broader public, analyze whether any problematic gaps are amenable to remediation by policy means, and assess potential solutions. The contributors also explore public disengagement and the effect of high levels of public support for the military combined with very low levels of trust in elected political leaders—both recurring themes in their research. And they reflect on whether American society is becoming so divorced from the requirements for success on the battlefield that not only will we fail to comprehend our military, but we also will be unwilling to endure a military so constituted to protect us. Contributors: Rosa Brooks, Matthew Colford,Thomas Donnelly, Peter Feaver, Jim Golby, Jim Hake, Tod Lindberg, Mackubin Thomas Owens, Cody Poplin, Nadia Schadlow, A. J. Sugarman, Lindsay Cohn Warrior, Benjamin Wittes

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.

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

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.

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.