Considering Baltimore and Philadelphia as part of a larger, Mid-Atlantic borderland, The Politics of Black Citizenship shows that the antebellum effort to secure the rights of American citizenship was central to black politics - it was an effort that sought to exploit the ambiguities of citizenship and negotiate the complex national, state, and local politics in which that concept was determined.

ANDREW K. DIEMER is assistant professor of history at Towson University. His work has been published in the Journal of Military History, Slavery and Abolition, and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.