The authors in this special issue examine this shifting relationship between power, rights, and legal status, demonstrating the importance of using US citizenship as a useful category of historical analysis. We illustrate how US lawmakers and community advocates continuously redefined the rights and privileges of Americans through a complex web of power relations centered on inclusion, exclusion, and dispossession. Throughout the twentieth century, every major change to federal naturalization and immigration law folded some individuals into US citizenship, while excluding or dispossessing others. These changes also denied some communities of their existing rights and privileges by incorporating them into US citizenship or denying them citizenship based on racial, political, and economic priorities. A relational approach that focuses on networks of inclusion, exclusion, and dispossession allows us to more accurately capture the power relations that define the history of US citizenship.