Here’s an exciting snapshot of African American History today at Johns Hopkins. “Through a New Lens” was a chance to talk about how Birthright Citizens fits into the larger field of African American history — 200 years after the first orators and pamphleteers told their stories.
“What comes next, I think, is that African-Americanist historians are going to be returning to some seemingly well-established subjects in U.S. history, and we are going look at them again,” she says. “You’ll frequently hear people in this field say insistently that ‘African-American history is U.S. history,’ but it also works in the other direction. There are many opportunities out there to come back to subjects that we think we know all about and look at them again through this lens of African-American history.”