Dr. Sean Andrew Wempe, A 2015 PhD alumnus and Assistant Professor of Modern European History at California State University–Bakersfield, was recently interviewed for New Books Network. Wempe discusses his 2019 book Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford UP) with Jack Guenther, a doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University. Find the link to the interview here.
Month / November 2021
History Dept. Co-Sponsors Rothschild Memorial Lecture Featuring Dahlia Lithwick
The History Department is a co-sponsor of the 13th annual Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild Memorial Lecture, scheduled for Nov. 11 and featuring lawyer, writer, and journalist Dahlia Lithwick. A Supreme Court expert and senior editor at Slate, Lithwick is also Senior Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Kogod Research Center and Lecturer at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she recently taught a course on the legacy of Justice Ginsburg. As a leading commentator on law, politics, and the Supreme Court, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Commentary.
Lithwick will speak on the legacy of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and will also give a faculty/graduate student seminar on the approach of the current Supreme Court to church-state issues. The program will explore the life and jurisprudence of Justice Ginsburg through a Jewish lens, including how her religious upbringing and immigrant background shaped her constitutional worldview and philosophy of what America could and should be. Find more information about the event, including registration, here.
The event is sponsored by Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and co-sponsored by Emory University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Center for Ethics, Center for Women, Departments of German Studies, History, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, and Religion, Office of Spiritual and Religious Life, and School of Law.
Reuters Quotes Anderson as Supreme Court Revisits Second Amendment
Reuters recently quoted Dr. Carol Anderson in a piece titled, “NRA lawsuit gives SCOTUS chance to confront 2nd Amendment’s roots in racism.” The article discusses a pending Supreme Court case on the 2nd Amendment and the possible implications if the justices were to consider the central argument from Anderson’s most recent book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021): that anti-Blackness was fundamental to the clause guaranteeing the right to bear arms. Anderson is Charles Howard Candler Professor, Chair of African-American Studies, and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read an excerpt from the Reuters piece below along with the full article: “NRA lawsuit gives SCOTUS chance to confront 2nd Amendment’s roots in racism.”
“But there’s another ‘originalist’ narrative evident in the very source materials the justices studied, which seems to have more support than their versions of history. Indeed, the historical record shows that the Second Amendment is rooted in racism and was written to preserve Southern state militias whose job it was to crush slave rebellions and capture runaways.
“The court’s acknowledgement of that narrative would indicate its willingness to confront our history in the forthright manner demanded by originalism — whether or not one agrees that we should adhere to the founders’ ideals.
“The thesis of racism at the root of the Second Amendment has been developed, most notably, by Carol Anderson, a bestselling author and historian at Emory University. Anderson published The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America in June. Anderson’s book also asserts that the right to weapons has been continuously denied to Black people.“