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The birth of formal citizenship education in the United States emerged in the context of mass immigration, the Progressive Movement, and the First World War. Wartime citizenship education has been chastised for its emphasis on patriotism and loyalty, and while this is a trend, historians have minimised the ways in which the democratic goals of the Progressive Movement at large also shaped citizenship education in its infancy. The paper situates citizenship education within the larger and broader aims of the Progressive Movement, and then looks at two federal agencies, the Bureau of Education and the Bureau of Naturalization, which produced and distributed the first citizenship curricula to the nation’s teachers. Ultimately, analysis of their citizenship textbook and teachers’ manual show that, even during war, it was assumed that through education any person, regardless of nationality or gender, could access citizenship, this being a very democratic mission in a paranoid moment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]