Discontent in Britain’s Thirteen Colonies had built to open violence by the mid-1770s, much of it occurring in and around Boston. (See Map 19.) A lack of representation and perceptions that British leaders pursued overbearing policies because they were indifferent or even hostile to the plight of the inhabitants pushed ever more colonists towards open rebellion. In response, the tools Britain possessed to confront its colonial troubles were limited by the nature of its government and the few instruments at its disposal. These included the army and navy, but their use at Boston only exacerbated tensions. Fighting flared on 19 April 1775 when British soldiers attempted to seize munitions at Concord, Massachusetts. Along the way, at Lexington, shots were fired and several colonists were killed. Afterwards, colonists sniped at and harried the British on their return to Boston. In the wake of Lexington and Concord, American militia gathered around Boston, surrounding its British garrison. Nearly two months after the outbreak of hostilities, the Americans seized and fortified the strategic Charlestown Peninsula overlooking Boston harbour. In response, the British stormed the position in what became known as the battle of Bunker Hill: the first major battle of the American Revolution. At the end of the day, the British held the field, but at the cost of nearly a quarter of their army in Boston.

This chapter moves beyond a captivity scholarship based almost entirely on the experiences of White or White-descent captives and their Indian captors to study an account of nineteenth-century borderland captivity in the US Southwest, where – contrary to what the plethora of Anglo captivity scholarship indicates – most captives were of Mexican and/or Indigenous descent. To do so, I read Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and the Goodness of God (1682) alongside María Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would’ve Thought It? (1872). This Mexican-American historical romance novel and, I would add, fictionalization of an Indian captivity narrative, retells the history of Mexican dispossession at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War through fictional Mohave captive and emerging Mexican American elite, Lola Medina. Within a broader rethinking of the captivity narrative genre, I argue that captivity narratives helped produced proto-Latinx subjects as racially discrete individuals, even while the factual condition of nineteenth-century captivity forced individuals of Latin-American descent into ambiguous relation with other racialized communities.

American Indian tribes are not often considered in comparative constitutional law but should garner more attention. Many tribes are dynamically remolding their constitutional structures. Nowhere is this dynamism more on display than in the re-shaping and re-structuring of tribal democratic institutions. The takeaway from this chapter is that tribal governments are experimenting carefully with different democratic structures, and the need for institutional change is seen as a moment of growth rather than a failure in their practice of iterative and evolutionary self-government. Reforms have become an almost natural – if not celebrated – part of perfecting their government structure.

This chapter focuses on ways to understand the Vietnam War through the operation of race in US interventions during the 1960s. As part of the inquiry, it examines friction between the United States and Panama in 1964 and the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. France’s legacy in Vietnam and the US adaptation of French racialized colonial policies provide a backdrop for the war. The Cold War, rather than territorial annexation or economic exploitation, provided the chief rationale for the US presence in Vietnam and provided a path for particularly American forms of racism to emerge there and in areas of US domestic life that were affected by the conflict. In the interim, Vietnam served as a laboratory in which various theories about modernization and development were evaluated and carried out. The experiences of American minorities in the military are documented, including officials’ efforts to control dissidence in the ranks. African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans experienced the war in somewhat different ways, but all found themselves confronted by leading assumptions and practices about their minoritarian status. The war led many to see themselves as racially defined in a struggle whose costs were disproportionately borne by people of color amidst discrimination at home and by Vietnamese combatants abroad. As a result new sensibilities led to transformation in American civil society.

On the first two days of September, two musicals opened that offered descriptions of different peoples of colour for white Broadway audiences: Sissle and Blake’s The Chocolate Dandies (African Americans); and Friml, Stothart, Harbach and Hammerstein’s Rose-Marie (Indigenous peoples of Canada). Problematic stereotypes were performed in both instances, though The Chocolate Dandies featured Josephine Baker and Elisabeth Welch in its cast. Musicals opening later in the month included a new edition of The Passing Show and George Gershwin’s musical written expressly for London, Primrose, with a book by Guy Bolton supervised by George Grossmith, Jr.

From the beginning, local language policies were crucial to the formation of the English-only movement. From the 1970s into the 1980s and 1990s, relatively disparate activists and politicians started to notice each other, collaborate with each other, and form English-only organizations together. To tell this story, I focus on the perspectives and experiences of key figures like Emmy Shafer, who started the current English-only movement in 1980 when she started organizing support for an Antibilingualism Ordinance targeting Spanish and Kreyòl in Dade County, Florida. Shafer pioneered a number of groundbreaking strategies that would become a blueprint, like emphasizing the local economy, starting a nonprofit, and hiring a ghostwriter. I also introduce the two figures who really popularized the idea of making English official: John Tanton and Senator S. I. Hayakawa. I discuss the founding of U.S. English and of English Language Advocates (later renamed ProEnglish). Ultimately, these people and organizations paved the way for the local language policies discussed in future chapters.

This chapter recovers the voices of marginalised US communities – Native, Jewish, and African Americans – bringing out of oblivion their Tercentenary contributions. It asks whether underprivileged racial and ethnic groups accepted the alleged superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural heritage, and whether, by appropriating Shakespeare, they attempted to become part of that heritage or to challenge its exclusivity. It demonstrates that 1916 America was torn between competing impulses of assimilation and diversity. The white majority held out ostensibly universal cultural standards to which all should aspire, while believing that they were unattainable to some groups. The minorities faced the irreconcilable demands of trying to conform to these standards at the cost of renouncing their distinct identity, while sensing that white supremacists would never accept them as equal no matter what they did. The Tercentenary celebrations registered these tensions and allowed the members of American minorities to produce hybrid Shakespearean appropriations, which accommodated a far-reaching critique of dominant ideology. They helped them to express their distinctive identities, while highlighting the entrenched inequality that they endured.

This essay probes two questions about popular sovereignty’s status as a philosophical and governing creed in early America. How did an unprecedented collective ‘people’ – a people of citizens who actively participated in governing and who constituted an abstract legitimating power – get fashioned notwithstanding the remarkable national, cultural, religious, and racial heterogeneity of Britain’s North American colonies and the early United States? Why did this remarkable achievement not last, culminating in rivers of blood? I argue that the constellation of ideas and institutions that had fashioned America’s civic people out of raw materials provided by Hobbes, Locke, and Madison was brought to crisis by how President Andrew Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun elaborated extensions to the scope of popular sovereignty in the name of democracy – Jackson regarding the movement of free white people westward; Calhoun concerning slavery and its expansion.

In Chapter 6, we consider the personal and political costs of varying domestic violence policies in the United States and we describe the challenges women face for civic participation due to being victims of domestic violence. There is ample evidence that domestic violence can be a barrier to voting and political participation for women, particularly women of color. We also discuss disparities in different communities based on race, ethnicity, and immigration status in terms of the investigation and prosecution of domestic violence crimes and the way domestic violence laws have used criminalization as an answer to domestic violence especially in communities of color. Women of color are much more likely to be accused of domestic violence instead of being seen as victims of it. Those victims who are treated as offenders must live with a conviction on their record, and in most states have their most fundamental right to vote removed while they serve their sentence or are on probation. In the last part of this chapter, we delve more deeply into the current system in place to protect women in light of public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

We conclude our book by summarizing our findings and discussing their implications. We circle back to where we began: violence against women remains a significant and serious impediment to achieving equal status for women in all dimensions of their lives. We offer suggested reforms for improving domestic violence laws and policy implementation at the federal and state levels while recognizing the limits of the federal government in dealing with what is essentially a very localized problem. The reality is that federalism creates unequal conditions for the human security of women across state lines. We end this chapter with proposed avenues of future research that explore more holistically the ways that communities deal with domestic violence. In expanding attention to domestic violence as a source of suppressed citizen participation by women in the United States, we hope to encourage the discipline of political science as well as policymakers and practitioners to address it more consistently and effectively.

The boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that cannot potentially be converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. This chapter explores the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of its identity. The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

This is the first of two chapters on indigenous peoples in settler states. Here I focus on the case of Native Americans in the United States and show that urbanization and the demographic shift out of reservations in the late twentieth century led to widespread re-identification from more narrow tribal identities to a broader Native American identity. Census data from the 1980 US census shows a robust negative correlation at the tribal level between levels of urbanization and speaking tribal languages at home – but not between high school education and tribal language ability – which adds further evidence that it is not literacy or education that is driving assimilation. However, due to the legalization of Native American casinos from the 1980s, tribal land suddenly became economically valuable and altered the incentives for ethnic homogenization. As expected, I find evidence for an increased salience in tribal identities among Native Americans, which has in some cases led to claims for new tribal land and even new tribal identities.

Chapter 4 looks at Mendonça’s journey to Portugal and Spain, and the network he established. It examines his education in Braga, his appointment as an attorney of the Confraternity of Our Lady Star of the Negroes in Lisbon and Toledo and the alliances he formed with the New Christians in Lisbon, in particular the Mesquita family. Then it interrogates his association with Indigenous Americans in Toledo. It presents the period 1670–1681 in Lisbon as crucial for his compact with the Apostolic Notary in Lisbon, Gaspar Mesquita, and his connection with ‘the New Christian question’ in Lisbon and the Atlantic. Their search for freedom is examined in relation to the denial of enslaved Africans’ freedom. The unity of the regional confederation in West Central Africa shaped Mendonça’s engagement with the freedom of enslaved Africans in Angola, Brazil, Spain and Portugal. It also served as a springboard for his networking with the Indigenous people and New Christians in the Atlantic, Portugal and Spain. Engaging with this dialogue provides a better understanding of how those whose liberty had been denied sought to overcome this by allying with different constituencies in the Atlantic region.

Homeless squatting on empty land is a local challenge, replicated on a world-wide scale. While some have argued that neoliberal globalization has had a homogenizing effect on domestic legal systems generally, and on states’ responses to squatting more specifically, domestic institutions retain significant capacity and capability to govern; and their resilience critically determines economic success and political stability and nation-states adapt to changing circumstances. This chapter frames our analyses of state responses to homeless squatting on empty land in the context of nation state norms and narratives: what we describe – adapting Robert Cover – as the property “nomos” of each jurisdiction. We argue that state responses to squatting are framed by the “foundational” regime goals through which the state’s role and relationships to citizens with respect to property were articulated and understood, and examine how these foundational goals with respect to private property, housing and citizenship emerged in each of the five primary jurisdictions from which we draw insights and illustrations in this book: the United States of America, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, and England and Wales. In doing so, we aim to better understand how domestic institutions, norms and narratives in each of these jurisdictions have shaped the nomos within which “the state” acts in response to homeless squatting on empty land.

Woody Guthrie attempts to compose an anthem that will speak for all Americans: “This Land Is Your Land.” Does he succeed? For some, the answer is “Yes.” For others – notably Indigenous Americans who see it as little more than an homage to settler colonialism – the answer is a resounding “No.”