Birthright Citizens

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She was formerly a Presidential Bicentennial Professor at the University of Michigan, and was a founding director of the Michigan Law School Program in Race, Law and History. She is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (2007) and co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015).

• Introduction: rights of colored men: debating citizenship in antebellum America; 1. Being a native, and free born: race and rights in Baltimore; 2. Threats of removal: colonization, emigration, and the borders of belonging; 3. Aboard the constitution: black sailors and citizenship at sea; 4. The city courthouse: everyday scenes of race and law; 5. Between the constitution and the discipline of the church: making congregants citizens; 6. By virtue of unjust laws: black laws and the reluctant performance of rights; 7. To sue and be sued: courthouse claims and the contours of citizenship; 8. Confronting Dred Scott: seeing citizenship from Baltimore city; 9. Rehearsals for reconstruction: new citizens in a new era; Epilogue: monuments to men.

'Beautifully written and deeply researched, Birthright Citizens transforms our understanding of the evolution of citizenship in nineteenth-century America. Martha S. 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, author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery