The Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History Seminar, Fall 2024

Description

Fall 2024 Session 

The New-York Historical Society’s Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History is pleased to announce its fall 2024 seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty:

 

Reconstruction and Its Legal Legacy

Meeting Dates & Times: Fridays, November 1, 8, 15, and 22, 2024 | 2–5 pm ET

Instructors: Laura F. Edwards, Martha S. Jones

SEMINAR DESCRIPTION:

This seminar will use the lens of legal history to explore the advent of Reconstruction’s short-lived experiment in democracy, through to its intended and unintended consequences today. Once an overlooked chapter labeled “the tragic era,” subsequent histories, beginning with W. E. B. DuBois’s 1935 Black Reconstruction, have examined the era’s transformations, terming it an “unfinished revolution,” a “second American revolution,” and, most recently, a “second American republic.” Reconstruction remade the nation’s legal regime and with it the economic, political, and social order. The same changes determined which Americans – women, immigrants, people of color, and workers – might claim rights and exercise them. Even today, Reconstruction is key to understanding power and governance in the United States. Provisions of 1868’s 14th Amendment – from birthright citizenship, to equal protection and due process, sanctions for insurrection, and voting rights – define core legal values and what people can expect of the government.

 

INSTRUCTORS:

Laura F. Edwards is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University. She is a prize-winning historian who focuses on the legal history of the nineteenth-century United States, with an emphasis on federalism, the history of legal institutions, and people’s interactions with the law. She is the author of five books, including A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights. Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent book is Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, recipient of the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.

 

LOGISTICS: 

The seminar will be presented in person* at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024, on the following dates:

• Friday, November 1, 2024 | 2–5 pm ET

• Friday, November 8, 2024 | 2–5 pm ET

• Friday, November 15, 2024 | 2–5 pm ET

• Friday, November 22, 2024 | 2–5 pm ET

Accepted students will receive further instructions and the classroom location within the New-York Historical Society.

*Although we encourage students to attend the class in person, livestream participation will be offered to admitted students who do not live in the New York Metropolitan Area or who are unable to attend a class in person. If you are interested in attending some or all of the class sessions virtually, please indicate this in your application statement.

 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: 

There is no tuition or other charge for this seminar, though participants will be expected to acquire the assigned books on their own. 

 

ABOUT ICH: 

The Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History (ICH) is the nation’s premier institute dedicated to ensuring that future generations of Americans understand the substance and historical development of the US Constitution. Located at the New-York Historical Society, the Institute is co-sponsored by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Political Science Association. The Association of American Law Schools is a cooperating entity. ICH prepares junior scholars and college instructors to convey to their readers and students the important role the Constitution has played in shaping American society. ICH also provides a national forum for the preparation and dissemination of humanistic, interdisciplinary scholarship on American constitutional history.

 

The Bonnie and Richard Reiss Graduate Institute for Constitutional History is supported, in part, by the Saunders Endowment for Constitutional History and a “We the People” challenge grant from the National Endow