In this lecture, legal historian Kunal Parker ranges over four centuries of immigration and citizenship law and canvasses the histories of immigrants, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, and the poor, exploring the American legal tradition of not only excluding and removing those from other countries, but also of rendering foreign their own populations.
Historians tend to focus on two questions about American tax politics: how much and how progressive (or regressive). But because the U.S. political system is designed to emphasize geography more strongly than class interest or political ideology, the history of federal taxation is best understood in geographical terms. Most generally, it is a story about redistribution from the South to the Northeast through the nineteenth-century tariff and from the Northeast to the South through the twentieth-century income tax. After reviewing the familiar story of tariff struggles, this lecture focuses on the lesser-known sectional politics of the income tax.
"The Roosevelts: An Intimate History" chronicles the lives of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, three members of the most prominent and influential family in American politics. This seven-part, fourteen-hour documentary from filmmaker Ken Burns follows the Roosevelts for more than a century, from Theodore’s birth in 1858 to Eleanor’s death in 1962. Special guests: John Kasson and William Leuchtenburg from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.