birthright citizens

BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENS: A HISTORY OF RACE AND RIGHTS IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

As former slaves struggled to become citizens, they redefined citizenship for all Americans. Birthright Citizens is their story.

Winner of the American Historical Association’s 2019 Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society.

Winner of the Organization of American Historians’ 2019 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book on civil rights in the United States anytime from 1776 to the present.

Winner of the American Society for Legal History 2019 John Phillip Reid Book Award for the best monograph published in English in Anglo-American Legal History.

Finalist for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora Sterling Stuckey Book Prize.

Finalist for the 2019 PROSE Award for best book in U.S./North American History by the American Association of Publishers.

Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans. Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, fulfilling the long-held aspirations of African Americans.

PRAISE FOR BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENS

“Beautifully written and deeply researched, Birthright Citizens transforms our understanding of the evolution of citizenship in nineteenth-century America. Martha Jones demonstrates how the constitutional revolution of Reconstruction had roots not simply in legal treatises and court decisions but in the day to day struggles of pre-Civil War African-Americans for equal rights as members of the national community.”-Eric Foner, Columbia University, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

Birthright Citizens is a brilliant and richly researched work that could not be more timely. Who is inside and who is outside the American circle of citizenship has been a fraught question from the Republic’s very beginnings. With great clarity and insight, Jones mines available records to show how one group–black Americans in pre-Civil War Baltimore– sought to claim rights of citizenship in a place where they had lived and labored. This is a must-read for all who are interested in what it means to be an American.” -Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family 

 Birthright Citizens gives new life to a long trajectory of African Americans’ efforts to contest the meaning of citizenship through law and legal action. Martha Jones takes a novel approach that scholars and legal practitioners will need to reckon with to understand history and our own times.” -Tera Hunter, Princeton University, author of Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century

“Martha Jones shed new light on the Dred Scott decision and the unrelenting African American fight for citizenship with original and compelling arguments grounded in remarkable research. Birthright Citizens is revelatory and timely, a book that arrives as another group of American wage another unrelenting fight for citizenship.” –Ibram X. Kendi, American University, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

“In this exacting study, legal historian Martha Jones reinterprets the Dred Scott decision through a fresh and utterly revealing lens, reframing this key case as just one moment in a long and difficult contest over race and rights. Part meditation on a great nineteenth-century city, part implicit reflection on contemporary immigration politics, and part historical-legal thriller, Birthright Citizens is an astonishing revelation of the intricacies and vagaries of black struggles for the rights of citizenship.” –Tiya Miles, University of Michigan, author of The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits

“Martha Jones’s ‘history of race and rights’ utterly upends our understanding of the genealogy of citizenship. Jones demonstrates the vibrancy of antebellum black ideas of birthright citizenship and their impact on black political and intellectual life. Written with verve, and pulling back the curtain on the scholar’s craft, Birthright Citizens makes an important contribution to both African American and socio-legal history.” –Dylan Penningroth, University of California, Berkeley, author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South

REVIEWS | COMMENTARY | ANALYSIS

Clea Simon, “Friends of the Court: How Pre-Civil War Black Used the Rule of Law,” Boston College Law School Magazine, Winter 2020.

Kalpana Kannabiran, “Retrieving the Idea of Citizenship,” The Hindu , January 28, 2020.

Richard D. Brown, “Review of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones,” Journal of the Early Republic 39, no. 3 (Fall 2019) 575-577.

Robert Gooding-Williams, “Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy,” Public Books. September 24, 2019.

Race in America, with Carol Jenkins. September 2019.

William G. Thomas, III, “Review of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9, no 3 (September 2019): 467-470.

Kyle G. Volk, “Review of Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” American Journal of Legal History 59, no. 3 (September 2019): 402-404.

Sean H. Wang, “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” Society & Space. August 2019.

William Hardin, “Review of Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” H-Early-America. August 2019.

A Midsummer Night’s Read: Summer Reading 2019,” Humanities Texas, May/June 2019.

Sara Miller Llana, “When Does Birthright Citizenship Become Citizenship for Sale?” Christian Science Monitor. May 8, 2019.

Robert J. Cottroll, “Review of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones,” Journal of American History 106, no. 1 (June 2019): 176-77.

Melissa Milewski, “New Directions in the Historiography of African American and the Law in the Antebellum United States,” Slavery & Abolition 40, no. 3 (2019): 606-613.

“Birthrights.” NPR’s Latino USA. November 2018.

“The Origins of Birthright Citizenship,” by Robert L. Tsai. Boston Review. November 2018.

“How African Americans Fought For and Won Birthright Citizenship 150 Years Before Trump Tried to Erase It.” Democracy Now. October 2018.

“The 14th Amendment and the History of Birthright Citizenship in the U.S.” NPR’s All Things Considered. October 2018.

“Ending Birthright Citizenship?” PRI’s The World. October 2018.

“The Real Origins of Birthright Citizenship.” The Atlantic. October 2018.

“Trump Challenges Constitution With Talk of an Executive Order to End Birthright Citizenship: Today’s Talker.” USA Today. October 2018.

“Race and Rights in Antebellum America.” The Age of Jackson Podcast. October 2018.

“The American Circle of Citizenship: Who is Inside and Who is Outside.” Pacifica Radio’s Letters and Politics. August 2018.

“Birthright Citizenship is a Powerful Weapon Against Racism. That’s Why We Must Protect It.” Washington Post. Jul 2018.

“The History Behind the Birthright Citizenship Battle,” New York Times, July 2018.

“How Baltimore’s Free Blacks Asserted Their Rights Before the Civil War.” Roughly Speaking: The Baltimore Sun. July 2018.

“How the 14th Amendment’s Promise of Birthright Citizenship Redefined America,” Time. July 2018.

“The Shaping of Citizenship.” WYPR’s On The Record. July 2018.

“Citizens: 150 Years of the 14th Amendment.” Public Books. July 2018.

“How to Resist Bad Supreme Court Rulings.” Washington Post. July 2018.

“A Definition of Citizenship: The Story of Two Writers Named William Yates.” Lapham’s Quarterly. July 2018.

“Demoting ‘Maryland, My Maryland’ Ends a Struggle Begun by Black Baltimoreans in 1863.” History News Network. April 2018.

“Legal History’s Debt to Frederick Douglass,” Journal of the Civil War Era and Muster: How the Past Informs the Present. February 2018.

“Race, Citizenship, and a Search for Intellectual Honesty,” Journal of the Civil War Era and Muster: How the Past Informs the Present. January 2018.

”Who Was Roger Taney?” WYPR Public Radio  August 2017.

“The 14th Amendment Solved One Citizenship Crisis, but it Created a New One.” Washington Post. July 2017.

“Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America.” New Books Network. July 2017.

“Before Frederick Douglass: William Watkins Speaks for Black Americans on Independence Day, July 4, 1831.” Medium. July 2017.

“Birthright Citizenship and Reconstruction’s Unfinished Revolution.” Journal of the Civil War Era.

“First the Streets, Then the Archives,” American Journal of Legal History 56, no. 1 (March 2016): 92-96.

“Marin et citoyen : être noir et libre à bord des navires états-uniens avant la Guerre civile.” Le Mouvement social, 3 (2015): 93-112.

“The Dreams Deferred in Baltimore’s Mortgage Crises Set the Stage for Unrest.” The Conversation. May 2015.

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