Episode Details

Who gets to be a citizen of the United States? How does the United States define who belongs to the nation?

Early Americans asked and grappled with these questions during the earliest days of the early republic.

Martha S. Jones is a Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and a former public interest litigator. Using details from her book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, Martha joins us to investigate how early Americans thought about citizenship and how they defined who could and couldn’t belong to the United States.

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Complementary Episodes

• Episode 076: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Becoming American in the Age of Revolution  
• Episode 096: Nichoals Guyatt, The Origins of Racial Segregation in the United States
• Episode 142: Manisha Sinha, A History of Abolition
• Episode 143: Michael Klarman, The Making of the United States Constitution
• Episode 157: The Revolution’s African American Soldiers
• Episode 166: Freedom and the American Revolution

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