2012 Robert F. Boden Lecture

Reconstruction and the Origins of Birthright Citizenship

Eric Foner
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
Columbia University

Professor Eric Foner's Boden Lecture will trace the origins of birthright citizenship—enshrined in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment—in the struggle to define citizenship in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. Referring as well to current debates over the principle, it will examine how various groups of Americans understood the definition of citizenship and the rights that went along with it before the Civil War, and how the struggle against slavery led to a new, more-expansive vision of the nature of American society. It will also look at the troubled history of citizens' rights during and after the retreat from Reconstruction.

Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and one of this country's most prominent historians. He received his doctoral degree at Columbia under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter and is one of the few people to have won the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes in the same year. His books include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (first published in 1970); Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988); and, most recently, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010). Professor Foner is a winner of the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates and Columbia University's Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.

This annual lecture remembers the late Robert F. Boden, who served as dean of Marquette University Law School from 1965 to 1984. This year's Boden Lecture is part of Marquette University's Freedom Project, a yearlong commemoration of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War. More information is available at online.

Parking is available on site.