'Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag'
...tweeted Donald Trump as President-Elect; ‘if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship’. His administration has also suggested repealing the 14th amendment allowing birthright citizenship. Some even want to strip citizenship from US-born children of undocumented immigrants. Citizenship, and how it designed and regulated, is the critical issue in America today. This series seeks engaged the campus community with elements of the national conversation, looking to understand the nuances of contemporary US citizenship, the challenges it faces, and the strategies we might advocate in seeking to strengthen its promise. They aimed also to excavate its heritage, from antiquity, through the founding, the Civil War, the women’s suffrage movement, and the Welfare State, to discover how earlier experiences have shaped the contours of what we see as “natural” today. The Changing Faces of U.S. Citizenship series joined faculty from the Departments of Political Science, History, Black Studies, Classics, and English, and the Carsey-Wolf Center in a collaborative program of undergraduate and graduate course offerings, panel discussions, a research colloquium, public lectures, film screenings, and workshops with local schools throughout the academic year 2017-18, and Fall 2018.
Contacts
Professor Elizabeth DePalma Digeser edepalma@history.ucsb.edu
Professor Helen Morales hmorales@classics.ucsb.edu
Related Undergraduate and Graduate Courses
Classics 152: Citizenship
Developed in conjunction with the Critical Issues series, a new GE course in Classics (CLASS 152: Citizenship: Ancient Origins and Modern Practice) is being taught for the first time this quarter. Through close analysis of such authors as Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca and examination of how ancient ideas have been applied to modern debates, students will investigate the relevance of classical models to citizenship in the contemporary US.
History 5: History of the Present
History 133A: 19th Century Germany: From 29 "Tribes" to 2 Nations
History 161B: Revolutionary America
History 164IB: US Immigration Since 1924