Denison: 'Law and the Borders of Belonging'

The Department of History welcomes historian and legal scholar Barbara Young Welke presenting “Law and the Borders of Belonging.” Questions of belonging rest at the heart of the modern liberal democratic state. What does belonging mean? Who belongs? Does belonging depend on there being others who do not belong? What is their relationship to the nation? Does it matter what the basis for belonging is, what the defining characteristics of belonging are? Who decides? What does law have to do with it? Focusing on the United States from the founding era through the 1920s, Welke addresses these questions, exploring the relationship between legal personhood and citizenship and how the history of the borders of belonging speaks to our own times. Welke is distinguished McKnight University professor, professor of history and professor of law at the University of Minnesota and co-director of the program in law and history. She is the author of “Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States” and “Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920,” which was awarded the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold prize in 2002 for the best book on the history of American law and society. Her prize-winning articles include “The Cowboy Suit Tragedy: Spreading Risk, Owning Hazard in the Modern American Consumer Economy,” Journal of American History, and “When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855-1914,” Law and History Review. She teaches classes in U. S. history, law and society, women’s legal history, and the history of citizenship. This talk is sponsored by the Organization of American Historians and the Sharp Fund in American History.