Harvard Club of San Diego Book Club
The Harvard Club of Sab Diego will have a Zoom book club meeting on Tuesday, August 18 at 12:00pm (Melbourne time). We will be discussing The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution by Eric Foner (2019). Ronnie Friedman-Barone has offered to facilitate the meeting and Loreen Collins will act as moderator to ensure everyone gets a chance to speak.
Date: Tuesday August 18th 2020
Time: 12.00pm Melbourne time
Bookings: If you want to join them, please e-mail Loreen Collins at presidenthcsd@roadrunner.com for the Zoom link to the meeting.
For more information, please click here.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation’s foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.
The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States.
Eric Foner’s compact, insightful history traces the arc of these pivotal amendments from their dramatic origins in pre–Civil War mass meetings of African-American “colored citizens” and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late nineteenth century. A series of momentous decisions by the Supreme Court narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments, while the states actively undermined them. The Jim Crow system was the result. Again today there are serious political challenges to birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection of the law. Like all great works of history, this one informs our understanding of the present as well as the past: knowledge and vigilance are always necessary to secure our basic rights.