Martha S. Jones

Historian, Author, Lecturer, Commentator

Martha S. Jones is a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual who explores the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America.

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  • Communications & Journalism

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Martha S. Jones Bio

Martha S. Jones is a writer, historian, legal scholar and public intellectual who explores the politics, culture, and poetics of Black America. She is the author of prize-winning books that survey the American past, from slavery and the founding, the Civil War and Reconstruction, women’s suffrage and Jim Crow, on through modern Civil Rights and present day race and identity, including The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, Vanguard: How Black Women Broker Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America. She writes for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Politico, and USA Today. Her work enjoys broad recognition from book prizes from the American Historical Association, the Organization for American Historians, the American Society for Legal History, and the Los Angeles Times, and fellowships from Berlin’s Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Library of Congress. She is a Guggenheim fellow and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and director the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project.

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