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.

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.”

Alexis de Tocqueville’s lifelong friend and companion Gustave de Beaumont produced a literary work based on their visit to the United States. Beaumont’s 1835 novel Marie, ou l’Esclavage aux Etats Unis, explored themes of race, manners, and equality in American society. Although Democracy in America is not a work of literature per se, it does contain a remarkable number of literary vignettes that give the work a distinctively literary quality. As Christine Dunn Henderson argues in this chapter, Tocqueville’s literary portraiture is a consistent rhetorical device throughout the book. His recourse to literary vignettes as a way of illustrating dimensions of race, religion, and American manners demonstrates the evocative power of literature to convey moral lessons by appealing to emotions rather than reason. In this regard, Tocqueville’s rhetorical strategy of sympathy and imaginative identification is reminiscent of Adam Smith’s use of vignettes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

In this chapter, Richard Avramenko suggests that Tocqueville’s voyage to America should be understood in light of a lifelong aristocratic concern for unearthing lost remnants of the Ancien Régime. By way of illustrating Tocqueville’s ambivalent relationship to aristocracy, Avramenko draws an etymological distinction between the concepts of “debris” and “remnants,” two words Tocqueville uses in systematic ways throughout his corpus to differentiate certain institutions of the Ancien Régime that are doomed from others that might be rehabilitated for a democratic age. Avramenko traces the etymology of these two words in the French tradition and then locates these usages in Tocqueville’s discussion of various aristocratic or quasi-aristocratic institutions in the United States such as the Native Americans, the American South, the military, the new industrial aristocracy, and the profession of the law. Avramenko finds one inspiration for Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont’s travels in their childhood fascination with a 1798 novella Voyage d’un Allemand au Lac Onéida by Sophie von La Roche. The book tells the story of an aristocratic couple’s exile to Lake Oneida, New York, one of the destinations Tocqueville and Beaumont visited during their travels as chronicled in Tocqueville’s “Journey to Lake Oneida.”

This chapter traces the rise of consumer goods in Europe and its colonies between 1650 and 1800. Women and men consumed ever larger quantities of clothing, personal accessories, household furnishings, and colonial products. However, any claim that the growth of consumption was “revolutionary” must confront two powerful objections: (1) that there were strict social limits to the spread of new types of consumption; and (2) that the growth of consumption was less sudden than it appears, having roots in the urban life and court society of preceding centuries. Taking these objections seriously, the chapter argues that consumption grew most intensively among nobles, gentry, professionals, skilled artisans, and better-off farmers. Many peasants, unskilled laborers, migrants, and enslaved people were excluded from participating in the consumer boom. Consumption was also gendered, with women leading the way in the acquisition of clothing. In the Americas, where indigenous Americans, European-descended settlers, African-descended slaves, and free people of color interacted, heterogeneous forms of consumption proliferated. The hybridity of sartorial culture reflected degrees of agency and self-fashioning among different socioracialized groups. The growth of towns and the advent of royal courts had encouraged new forms of consumption before 1650, but Europe experienced a more thoroughgoing social transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume of goods increased, their variety widened, and their social reach deepened.

This chapter traces the rise of consumer goods in Europe and its colonies between 1650 and 1800. Women and men consumed ever larger quantities of clothing, personal accessories, household furnishings, and colonial products. However, any claim that the growth of consumption was “revolutionary” must confront two powerful objections: (1) that there were strict social limits to the spread of new types of consumption; and (2) that the growth of consumption was less sudden than it appears, having roots in the urban life and court society of preceding centuries. Taking these objections seriously, the chapter argues that consumption grew most intensively among nobles, gentry, professionals, skilled artisans, and better-off farmers. Many peasants, unskilled laborers, migrants, and enslaved people were excluded from participating in the consumer boom. Consumption was also gendered, with women leading the way in the acquisition of clothing. In the Americas, where indigenous Americans, European-descended settlers, African-descended slaves, and free people of color interacted, heterogeneous forms of consumption proliferated. The hybridity of sartorial culture reflected degrees of agency and self-fashioning among different socioracialized groups. The growth of towns and the advent of royal courts had encouraged new forms of consumption before 1650, but Europe experienced a more thoroughgoing social transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume of goods increased, their variety widened, and their social reach deepened.