Birthright Citizens: Winners and Losers in the History of American Belonging

The rights extended to people who reside in the United States and whether or not those people are considered citizens is an incredibly timely topic, and historian Martha S. Jones can connect lessons and information from the past that shed light on the current landscape. Jones, the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, gave the 2019 Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern Cultural History on Sept. 17 in Nutt Auditorium at the University of Mississippi. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. Her talk focuses on the first chapter of her book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015,) along with many articles and essays. Jones holds a doctorate in history from Columbia University and a Juris Doctor from the CUNY School of Law. Before starting her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work as a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University. Jones is working on Vanguard: A History of African American Women’s Politics (Basic), to be published in 2020 in conjunction with the 19th Amendment’s centennial, and is at work on a biography of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. She is recognized as a public historian, frequently writing for broader audiences at outlets including the Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education and Time.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/gilder-jordan/1003/thumbnail.jp