Public Lectures at the National Humanities Center

As the United States confronts a surge of unaccompanied minors at its southern border, the political activity of undocumented immigrants within its borders, and unprecedented levels of deportation, the country faces—yet again—a series of familiar questions. How many immigrants should we admit? What do we owe to immigrants? How should we treat them after they have arrived? In grappling with such questions, however, we do not often examine the long history of immigration and citizenship law. In this lecture, legal historian Kunal Parker will range over four centuries of immigration and citizenship law and canvass the histories of immigrants, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, and the poor, exploring the American legal tradition of not only excluding and removing those from other countries, but also of rendering foreign their own populations.

Historians, like other commentators, tend to focus on two questions about American tax politics: how much and how progressive (or regressive). These are important questions, but they can neglect one of the crucial determinants of tax policy. Because the U.S. political system is designed to emphasize geography more strongly than class interest or political ideology, the history of federal taxation is best understood in geographical terms. Most generally, it is a story about redistribution from the South to the Northeast through the nineteenth-century tariff and from the Northeast to the South through the twentieth-century income tax. After reviewing the familiar story of tariff struggles, this lecture will focus on the lesser-known sectional politics of the income tax.

Michael Puri plays Debussy's Danse.

Questions surrounding US citizenship have long been (and continue to be) contentious. In her talk, Martha Jones explores the history of citizenship in the United States in the era before the Fourteenth Amendment, when free African Americans generated a pointed set of questions about who could be a citizen and what rights attached to them. Jones is associate chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, associate professor of history and Afroamerican and African studies, and a member of the University of Michigan Law School's affiliated Literature, Science, and the Arts faculty. She is codirector of the Michigan Law Program in Race, Law & History and the Law in Slavery and Freedom Project. Her scholarly interests include the history of race, citizenship, slavery, and the rights of women in the United States and the Atlantic world. Jones is the author of "All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900" (2007). Her current projects include two books: "Overturning Dred Scott: Race, Rights, and Citizenship in Antebellum America" and "Riding the Atlantic World Circuit: Slavery and Freedom in the Era of the Haitian Revolution". She is working this year as the William C. and Ida Friday Fellow at the Center.

In a year in which we mark both the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, we can reflect on the factors that shaped these pivotal events in American history. In her talk, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham will explore the ways that religion permeated the vernacular of the abolitionist and civil rights movements. Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. She is currently chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and has held this position since 2006. The recipient of numerous awards for her scholarly work, Higginbotham's writings span diverse fields—African American religious history, women's history, civil rights, constructions of racial and gender identity, electoral politics, and the intersection of theory and history. She is the author of "Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920" (1993), which won numerous book prizes. She is also coeditor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of the "African American National Biography" (2008), a multivolume reference work that presents African American history through the lives of people. In 2010 she was coauthor with the late John Hope Franklin of the revised and rewritten classic "From Slavery to Freedom". This year, as the John Hope Franklin Fellow at the Center, she is working on "The Great Question of Human Rights in American History". She was previously a Fellow at the Center in 1993–94.

Charles McGovern's public lecture at the National Humanities Center on September 26, 2013.

M.H. Abrams' lecture with an introduction by Frances Ferguson at the National Humanities Center on April 12, 2007.