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Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America Audiobook
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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 S. 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 when the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, the aspirations of black Americans' aspirations were realized.
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About Martha S. Jones
Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. She is a past co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the oldest and largest association of women historians in the United States, and she sits on the executive board of the Society of American Historians. She is the author of Vanguard, Birthright Citizens, and All Bound up Together and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, and more.
About Janina Edwards
Janina Edwards, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a native of Chicago and a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts acting program. Her 2016 performance of Voice of Freedom was a finalist for the Audie Award.