PROGRAM
Please join us as Roosevelt House—together with the Hunter College Sociology Department and the Tenement Museum—hosts a discussion that will delve into the profound and ongoing impact of the 14th Amendment on American identity, and, in particular, its guarantee of birthright citizenship.
Moderated by author and Hunter College Professor of Sociology Margaret M. Chin, this panel will feature renowned historians Harold Holzer, one of the country’s foremost Abraham Lincoln scholars; Mae Ngai, a history professor and specialist on citizenship; and the President of the Tenement Museum, Annie Polland. Among the primary considerations for the panel will be the 14th Amendment’s complex history—including its role in defining citizenship and its relevance to contemporary debates about belonging. Also to be discussed is how the promise of equal protection has been both realized—and challenged—throughout the nation’s history. In addition, the panel will draw upon examples from the stories preserved by the Tenement Museum—bringing historical legal debates into the context of the lived experiences of immigrants and citizens.
Margaret M. Chin is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Hunter College and a Faculty Associate of both Roosevelt House and the Asian American Studies Center. She is the author of the award-winning books Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry, an ethnography about immigrant garment workers; and Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder, winner of the Association of American Publishers 2021 PROSE Book Award. Her most recent book, with Syed Ali, is The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become, which she appeared at Roosevelt House to discuss.
Harold Holzer has served since 2015 as the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. A prolific author with more than 50 books to his credit, he won the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Prize for his Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion, and earlier earned a 2008 National Humanities Medal and co-chaired the U. S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. His most recent book is the award-winning Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration, which has been hailed as “a groundbreaking account of Lincoln’s grappling with the politics of immigration against the backdrop of the Civil War.”
Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and professor of history at Columbia University. She is a legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora. She is the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America; The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America; The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics; and the forthcoming Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea. Ngai has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and Dissent. Before becoming a historian, she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education.
Annie Polland is a public historian, author, and President of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Previously, she served as the Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society. She is the co-author, with Daniel Soyer, of Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award. She received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and served as Vice President of Education at the Museum at Eldridge Street, where she wrote Landmark of the Spirit.
