The New York Times has named Professor Kate Masur’s book, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (W. W. Norton, 2021), one of the best books of 2021. The work examines the restrictive codes called Black laws or Black codes that constrained the lives of Black people in northern free states, where slavery was banned.
Recently, Masur spoke about the book with Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition, where she discussed the fight against the Midwestern Black laws and the connections to mobilizations for racial justice today.
Learn more about Kate Masur:
Kate Masur (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2001) specializes in the history of race, politics, and law in the nineteenth-century United States. She is the author of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (W. W. Norton, 2021) and numerous other books and articles including An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (UNC Press, 2010), and, with Gregory Downs, The World the Civil War Made (UNC Press, 2015).
Masur has consulted extensively with museums and arts organizations including the National Constitution Center and the Newberry Library. She was part of the editorial team that created Reconstruction: The Official National Park Service Handbook, and she co-authored, with Gregory Downs, The Era of Reconstruction, 1861-1900, a National Historic Landmark Theme Study published in 2017. She was also a key consultant for the 2019 documentary, Reconstruction: America after the Civil War and appeared in the recent CNN film, Lincoln: Divided We Stand.
Masur regularly works with K-12 teachers and speaks with the media on topics including the Civil War and Reconstruction, Lincoln, and monuments and public memory. She and Downs are co-editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era, published by University of North Carolina Press.
Masur’s scholarship has recently appeared in The Journal of the Civil War Era and the American Journal of Legal History, in volumes on the Memphis Massacre and biographical film in history, and as commentary in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Washington Post’s Made By History.
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