The Fourteenth Amendment (320-0-20)
Instructors
Kate Masur
847/491-2849
Harris Hall - Room 202
My historical scholarship focuses primarily on the nineteenth-century United States, with an emphasis on race, gender, law and politics. I teach U.S. Women’s History, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and a variety of more specialized topics. I’ve written or edited several books, the most recent of which is *Freedom Was in Sight! A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C. Region*.
Joanna Grisinger
847 491 3987
620 Lincoln St #201
I am an American legal historian who works on the modern administrative state. At Northwestern, I teach courses on law and society, U.S. legal history, gender and the law, and constitutional law. My first book, The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics since the New Deal (Cambridge, 2012), examines the politics of administrative law reform; I am currently working on a project about the relationship between administrative agencies and social movements.
Meeting Info
Harris Hall 107: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM
Overview of class
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, promised equal protection and due process for all, and it declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens of the United States. The amendment's consequences for American federalism were vast. But the change was even greater than that, for Americans began to understand rights differently. Much of today's rights-based culture—including ideas about the right to marry, the right to privacy, and the right to be free of discrimination—is founded in the Fourteenth Amendment and its legal and cultural legacies.
Learning Objectives
Learning Objectives (FD-HS) Students will…
• Acquire knowledge of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is the part of the US Constitution that's most significant for defining and protecting individual rights. Students will learn about the origins of the amendment and its subsequent uses and interpretations, both by the US Supreme Court and by Americans more generally.
• Develop proficiency in reading and interpretating court decisions, which involves learning specialized language and legal conventions, developing capacity to recognize and assess complex arguments, and making connections across diverse texts.
• Analyze additional primary sources, including learning how to assess a source's context and meanings and exploring how such sources shed light on the experiences of people who lived in the past.
• Analyze secondary sources, including reading not just for information but for historians' arguments about the past; assessing how historians use evidence to develop an argument; and understanding how historical interpretations have changed and come into conflict over time.
• Develop capacity to think historically, which means striving to understand the worldviews of people who lived in different times and places and exploring causes of major events.
• Express the results of historical study in written and oral forms by engaging in reasoned and respectful conversations in lectures and sections, and by writing a series of papers. U.S. Overlay Learning Objectives (U.S. Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equality) Students will. . .
• Explore how pressing questions, particularly about race and the status of Black Americans, prompted the creation of the 14th Amendment and have been central to its interpretation ever since ratification in 1868. • Examine the Supreme Court's important role in constructing and enforcing formal categories of (and protections regarding) ethnicity, gender, nationality, race, and social status, often in overlapping and intersecting ways.
• Investigate how people have used the 14th Amendment to argue for rights and inclusion not only of Black Americans but also of other racial minorities, poor people, women, and LGBTQ+ people. Assess the relative success of such claims and how the Supreme Court has acted - and continued to act - as an arbiter of those claims under the amendment.
• Analyze how social movements and other non-court actors have shaped constitutional interpretation, through engagement with primary sources and scholarship on historical and contemporary legal institutions shaping racism and anti-racism; power and resistance; justice and injustice; equality and inequality; agency and subjection; and belonging and subjection.
• Reflect on the relationship between popular conversations about rights and formal, constitutional discourses; consider the role of the Supreme Court within the broader structures of governing and power in the United States. Advanced Expression Learning Objectives: Students will. . .
• Write a series of papers of increasing length and complexity, receiving feedback on each one to enable them to hone their skills during the quarter.
• Write weekly very short responses to assigned reading, to encourage analytical reading and concise written expression.
• Develop skills in expository writing through assignments that ask them to consider all sides of an issue, address alternative interpretations, and acknowledge what remains uncertain or unknowable.
• Approach writing as a process that requires drafting, revision, and rethinking.
Class Notes
History Major Concentration(s): Americas
Class Attributes
Historical Studies Foundational Discipline
Historical Studies Distro Area
U.S. Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity
Associated Classes
DIS - Harris Hall L06: Fri 9:00AM - 9:50AM
DIS - Kresge Centennial Hall 2-435: Fri 10:00AM - 10:50AM
DIS - Harris Hall L06: Fri 11:00AM - 11:50AM
DIS - Harris Hall L06: Fri 12:00PM - 12:50PM
DIS - Harris Hall L06: Fri 1:00PM - 1:50PM
DIS - Harris Hall L06: Fri 2:00PM - 2:50PM