Almost Citizens draws together recent work on Reconstruction, empire, citizenship, bureaucracy, and law. Sitting alongside recent work demonstrating the long half-life of the post–Civil War settlement, this project recounts the decline of the Reconstruction Constitution as a durable, consequential constraint on empire. Well into the twentieth century, fights over the past of Reconstruction and the future of empire were inextricably intertwined. This book pursues a key goal for scholars of citizenship: it illuminates how modestly situated individuals, powerful actors, and large structural forces interacted to bring about historical change. It also attends to federal institutional diversity. Cabinet members, judges, elected officials, and, perhaps especially, midlevel administrators all played prominent, complex, and intertwined roles. Law, judges, and politics each influenced the other. Through a slow and creative process, administrators, elected officials, and judges together forged new and ambiguous doctrines to suit imperial power. Key Puerto Ricans struggled mightily against the change, which they sometimes bent to their own purposes. The pages that follow tell the story.