PROGRAM
Roosevelt House is honored to present a conversation with one of the nation’s foremost constitutional scholars, Akhil Reed Amar, on his new book Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920. As compelling as it is thorough, Born Equal delivers the definitive history of how the ideal of birth equality reshaped the American Constitution—from antebellum debates over slavery and secession, to the Civil War and emancipation, to women’s suffrage. The author will be in conversation with award-winning historian and CUNY Graduate Center history professor emeritus James Oakes.
Recounting the dramatic constitutional debates that unfolded across the eight decades from 1840 to 1920, Akhil Reed Amar explores the monumental significance of the four amendments that abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender. At the heart of this era, Amar writes, was the ever-evolving idea that all Americans are created equal. But in the 19th century, remarkable American women and men—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln—elaborated a new vision of what this ideal demanded. Their debates played out from Seneca Falls to the halls of Congress, from Bleeding Kansas to Gettysburg, from Ford’s Theater to the White House gates, ultimately transforming the nation and the world.
An ambitious narrative history and a penetrating work of legal and political analysis, Born Equal is a vital new portrait of America’s winding road toward equality.
Featuring:
Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University and the author of several books on constitutional law and history, including America’s Constitution: A Biography; The Constitution Today: Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era; and The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840. After graduating from Yale College in 1980 and from Yale Law School in 1984, and clerking for Judge (later Justice) Stephen Breyer, Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985 at the age of 26. He is Yale’s only living professor to have “won” the University’s unofficial triple crown: the Sterling Chair for scholarship, the DeVane Medal for teaching, and the Lamar Award for alumni service. His work has won awards from both the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society, and he has been cited by Supreme Court justices in more than 50 cases. He is the host of Amarica’s Constitution, a podcast offering in-depth discussions on the most urgent and fascinating constitutional issues of the day.
James Oakes is history professor emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he began as a faculty member in 1997 and where he served as Graduate School Humanities Chair beginning in 1998. A leading historian of 19th-century America, he is the author of Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South; The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics; and Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865. The latter two garnered, respectively, the 2008 and 2013 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. His most recent book is The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution.
