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Review of:Kennedy, K. J., Fairbrother, G.P., and Zhao Zhenzhou (2014) Citizenship Education in China: Preparing Citizens for the "Chinese Century" Abingdon and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-50272-6

Social citizenship in the classical sense of T.H. Marshall has been declared to be eroded and to have lost its significance. The introduction to this special issue challenges this assumption and argues that recent anthropological work on social citizenship in post-colonial, post Cold War and post-socialist states have shown that social citizenship is relevant and is being claimed by citizens of these states. Historical notions of citizenship as well as claiming rights to state support in return for having worked for the state are at work here. Furthermore the contributions to this issue illustrate how notions and practices of social citizenship compete and sometimes replace other practices of claiming citizenship on the basis of ethnicity, nationality or cultural ties. Adapted from the source document.

The connection between citizenship & race in historical American society is studied to demonstrate how American understandings of citizenship has changed over time. An analysis of the US Constitution revealed that American Indians were separated from other Americans & that American citizens were separated into "the people" & "persons." Further analysis of the thinking of some Founding Fathers & other relevant literature indicated that African Americans were considered as persons rather than belonging to the people. Multiple factors responsible for excluding African Americans from gaining citizenship rights prior to the Civil War are identified. Although the Civil War & the subsequent Reconstruction essentially challenged the prevailing tendency to define citizenship racially, the common perception that the US had become a color-blind society following the Civil War is strongly repudiated. In fact, it is noted that many ethnic minority groups & women retained fewer citizenship rights than white Americans following the Reconstruction period. However, circumstances that actually incorporated cultural pluralism into conceptualizations of citizenship during the 1930s are identified. It is concluded that attempts to define the American citizen will persist long into the 21st century. J. W. Parker

This volume explores the political & cultural dimensions of citizenship & their relevance to women & gender. Containing essays by leading scholars such as Iris Marion Young, Alison Jaggar, Martha Nussbaum, it examines the conceptual issues & strategies at play in the feminist quest to give women full citizenship status