History is an important tool when it comes to understanding American law. History is what the justices of the United States Supreme Court use when they want to ascertain what the framers meant when they drafted the Constitution of 1787 and its first ten amendments in 1789. And history is also the tool we use when we want to know how and why the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution and its amendments have changed over … [Read more...]
Episode 262: Interpreting the Fourth Amendment
Episode 261: Creating the Fourth Amendment
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution doesn’t always make headlines, but it’s an amendment that undergirds foundational rights. It’s also an amendment that can show us a lot about the intertwined nature between history and American law. In this third episode of our 4th Doing History series, we explore the early American origins of the Fourth Amendment with Thomas Clancy, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Mississippi … [Read more...]
Episode 260: Creating the First Ten Amendments
How and why did Congress draft the First Ten Amendments to the Constitution? In the United States, we use the Constitution and Bill of Rights to understand and define ourselves culturally. Americans are a people with laws and rights that are protected by the Constitution because they are defined in the Constitution. And the place where the Constitution defines and outlines our rights is within its First Ten Amendments, the Bill of … [Read more...]
Episode 259: American Legal History & the Bill of Rights
Law is all around us. And the basis of American Law comes not only from our early American past, but from our founding documents. This episode begins our 4th Doing History series. Over the next four episodes, we’ll explore the early American origins of the Bill of Rights as well as the history of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment will serve as our case study so we can see where our rights come from and how they developed from the … [Read more...]
Episode 258: Jane Calvert, John Dickinson Life, Religion, & Politics
The Second Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776 with 12 colonies and one abstention. The delegation from New York abstained from the vote. And Pennsylvania voted in favor of independence because two of its delegates were persuaded not to attend the vote given their opposition. John Dickinson was one of the two delegates who absented himself from the vote. Later, he would refuse to sign the Declaration of Independence. … [Read more...]
Episode 257: Catherine O’Donnell, Elizabeth Seton An Early American Life
What was it like to live as a woman of faith in early republic America? What was it like to live as a Catholic in the early United States? Catherine O’Donnell, an Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University and author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint, helps us investigate answers to these questions by taking us through the life of the United States’ first saint: Elizabeth Ann Seton. Listen Now | About the Show Ben … [Read more...]
Episode 256: Christian Koot, Mapping Empire in the Chesapeake
How do empires come to be? How are empires made and who makes them? What role do maps play in making empires? Christian Koot is a Professor of History at Towson University and the author of A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake. Christian has researched and written two books about the seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch World to better understand empires and how they are made. Today, he joins us to take us through his … [Read more...]
Episode 255: Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens
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 … [Read more...]
Episode 254: Jeffrey Sklansky, The Money Question in Early America
We read and hear a lot about money. We read and hear about fluctuations in the value of the Dollar, Pound, and Euro, interest rates and who can and can’t get access to credit, and we also read and hear about new virtual currencies like Bitcoin and Facebook’s Libra. We talk a lot about money. But where did the idea of money come from? Did early Americans think about money a lot too? Jeffrey Sklansky is a Professor of History at the … [Read more...]
Episode 253: Susan Clair Imbarrato, Life & Revolution in Boston & Grenada
What can a family history tell us about revolutionary and early republic America? What can the letters of a wife and mother tell us about life in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions? These are questions Susan Clair Imbarrato, a Professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead, set out to answer as she explored an amazing trove of letters to and from a woman named Sarah Gray Cary. Listen Now | … [Read more...]
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