From the University of Georgia Press, here's a new release that appears to speak to important themes in legal history: Divided Sovereignties: Race, Nationhood, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America (2016), by Rochelle Raineri Zuck (University of Minnesota, Duluth). A description from the Press:
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates about the constructions
of American nationhood and national citizenship, the frequently invoked
concept of divided sovereignty signified the division of power between
state and federal authorities and/or the possibility of one nation
residing within the geopolitical boundaries of another. Political and
social realities of the nineteenth century—such as immigration, slavery,
westward expansion, Indigenous treaties, and financial panics—amplified
anxieties about threats to national/state sovereignty.
Rochelle Raineri Zuck argues that, in the decades between the
ratification of the Constitution and the publication of Sutton Griggs’s
novel Imperium in Imperio in 1899, four populations were most
often referred to as racial and ethnic nations within the nation: the
Cherokees, African Americans, Irish Americans, and Chinese immigrants.
Writers and orators from these groups engaged the concept of divided
sovereignty to assert alternative visions of sovereignty and collective
allegiance (not just ethnic or racial identity), to gain political
traction, and to complicate existing formations of nationhood and
citizenship. Their stories intersected with issues that dominated
nineteenth-century public argument and contributed to the Civil War.
In five chapters focused on these groups, Zuck reveals how
constructions of sovereignty shed light on a host of concerns including
regional and sectional tensions; territorial expansion and jurisdiction;
economic uncertainty; racial, ethnic, and religious differences;
international relations; immigration; and arguments about personhood,
citizenship, and nationhood.
More information is available
here. Subscribers to Project Muse may access full content
here.
