NU Faculty Live with Kate Masur on November 16: Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Northwestern Professor of history Kate Masur will discuss her recent book, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction during the NU Faculty Live event on November 16, 2022.

The event will be held at the Segal Visitors Center, 1841 Campus Drive in Evanston, IL from 5 – 7:30 pm CDT. Tickets are $15 for recent alumni (undergraduate classes 2022–12) and current students; and $20 for alumni and friends.

Learn more information about this event and register here.

A 2021 New York Times critics’ pick described by the Washington Post as a “brilliant meditation on progress and its limits,” her book sheds light on the little-known pre–Civil War movement for racial equality in the northern states, including Illinois. Masur explains how this movement pushed from the margins to the center of politics, influencing Republican policies and shaping the nation’s first federal civil rights measures.

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, monuments, and public memory. She and Downs are co-editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era, published by the 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.

View recent articles about Kate Masur.