Historians’ role, she argues, isn’t simply to impart expertise, but to consider what people want from history, and approach their reactions with empathy. Today’s history wars, she said in an interview, may only get more intense as the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding in 2026 - and require more from historians, she argues, than the kind of rancorous scholarly fisticuffs that so often catch the public’s attention. And among them will be a “manifesto” on the role of history in the current racial reckoning. Now, Jones, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, has signed an unusual four-book deal with Basic Books for a series of works that will address the tangled history of race, slavery and identity. “Vanguard,” a political history of Black women that challenged popular narratives of the suffrage movement, was timed to coincide with the centennial of the 19th Amendment last August - but also happened to coincide with the election of Kamala Harris as America’s first female vice president. “Birthright Citizens,” her 2018 scholarly study of the history of 19th-century debates about Black citizenship in America, arrived at a moment when some conservatives had floated the idea of ending the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that all people born in America are automatically citizens. Jones has a nose for writing deeply researched histories that land in the middle of the rough and tumble of our national politics - sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.
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