Historic Supreme Courts--14th Amendment, Episode 2: Birthright and Revolution: How Reconstruction Rewrote American Citizenship

This episode examines how Radical Reconstruction leaders—John Bingham, Jacob Howard, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull, and Thaddeus Stevens—redefined American citizenship after the Civil War. They rejected the Taney Court's state-centered, racialized view and pushed a national birthright model through the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment.

By establishing citizenship as an individual right conferred by birth in the United States, their work created a national people, limited state power to exclude, and reshaped the nation from a federation of states into a republic of citizens.