Unpacking 1619 - A Heights Libraries Podcast Heights Libraries

The eighth amendment of the U.S. Constitution states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” This episode kicks off a 3-part series that investigates this amendment, beginning with a conversation with Alex Reinert. He discusses his article, “Reconceptualizing the 8th Amendment: Slaves, prisoners, and ‘Cruel and […]

Vida Johnson is an Associate Professor at Georgetown Law. She discusses her article, “Bias in Blue: Instructing Jurors to Consider the Testimony of Police Officer Witnesses with Caution”.   

Professor of Law at Harvard Law School Alexandra Natapoff discusses her book, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal. 

Kelsey Klotz is a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She received her PhD in Musicology with a certificate in American Studies from Washington University in St. Louis in 2016. Her research focuses on the intersection of race and sound in 1950s and 1960s American musical culture, with a particular focus on […]

Richard Rothstein discusses his book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which recovers a forgotten history of how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation.

Professor Krugler discusses his book, 1919: the Year of Racial Violence and How African Americans Fought Back. We specifically focus on Chicago and Knoxville riots with an eye on how Black World War I veterans factored into de-escalating the White mobs.