"What does it mean to be an American citizen? We might immediately answer this question in terms of suffrage, a right that represented much of the historical struggle for inclusion. . . In Learning One's Native Tongue: Citizenship, Contestation, and Conflict in America, Tracy B. Strong cautions against such an answer. American citizenship, Strong emphasizes, is a political matter about “what or who one is,” its criteria open to contestation, dispute, and redefinition. Learning One’s Native Tongue is a conceptual history of citizenship that highlights these disputes from the Puritans to the present."

The Review of Politics

"Writing at the nexus of literature, history, philosophy, and politics, Strong takes a historical jaunt, interspersed with literary quotes, that elucidates the US's changing criteria for citizenship and forces the reader to grapple with conceptualizations of what citizenship actually means in the US."

Choice

"The theses of Consensus scholarship have long since collapsed from decades of critique and revision. What power Consensus School interpretation still holds in the humanities lies in its scope and its ability to craft grand narratives and tell big stories. Challenges to Consensus thought since the 1970s have been, by and large, as atomized and fractious as the society and academy that produced them. Tracy Strong seeks to re-impose grand narrative in his new volume, Learning One’s Native Tongue, a marvelous synthesis of history and political science on the question of what it means to be an American citizen... Strong offers his readers a subtle but important revision of Consensus thought. For the author, there is no grand bargain or agreement at the heart of the American experience, and, therefore, no steady and certain advance of liberty and equality. The author’s view encompasses historical episodes and strains of American thought not easily handled by Consensus literature."

New Mexico Historical Review