Ariela Gross | |
---|---|
Born | 1965 (age 57–58) Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. |
Awards | Lillian Smith Book Award |
Academic background | |
Education | B.A., History and Literature, Harvard University JD., 1994, Stanford Law School MA, 1991, PhD, History, 1996, Stanford University |
Thesis | Pandora's box slavery, character, and Southern culture in the courtroom, 1800-1860 (1996) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | UCLA School of Law |
Website | arielagross |
Ariela Julie Gross (born 1965) is an American historian. Previously the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law (USC),she is now a Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law.
Gross was born in 1965 [1] and raised in Princeton,New Jersey. [2] Selected for the Presidential Scholars Program after graduating from Princeton High School in 1983,Gross led an effort to have Presidential Scholars sign a petition requesting a nuclear freeze,which was presented to President Ronald Reagan with signatures from 14 of that year's 140 honorees. [3] She attended Harvard University for her Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Literature and later earned her JD from Stanford Law School and Master's degree and PhD from Stanford University. [4]
Upon earning her PhD,Gross joined the faculty at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law (USC) in 1996. [2] During her early years at the school,Gross earned three fellowships;a Guggenheim Fellowship, [5] the Frederick J. Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, [6] and a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship at the Huntington Libraries. [4] This allowed her to research American courts interpretations of racial identity throughout history. [5] Gross' research led her to publish her first book titled Double Character:Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom. The book focused on the legal proceedings of civil disputes over property in the deep South pre the American Civil War. She specifically focused on the legal dispute over slave ownership that required not only a moral judgment of slaves as human beings to be called into question but the moral judgment of the slave owners as well. [7] In 2007,Gross received the USC's endowed faculty position title of John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History. [8]
Following her endowed faculty appointment,Gross published her second book What Blood Won’t Tell:A History of Race on Trial in America through the Harvard University Press. [9] The book focused on how American society built race as a social and political construct and why racial identity was important. [10] Her book received the 2009 Lillian Smith Book Award,the James Willard Hurst Jr. Prize,and the American Political Science Association’s award for the best book on race,ethnicity,and politics. [11] The following year,she accepted a short-term residency in Japan through the Organization of American Historians and the Japanese Association for American Studies to teach at Kyoto University. [12]
During the 2017–18 academic year,Gross was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University to work on a manuscript for a future book. [13] In January 2020,Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente co-published their book Becoming Free,Becoming Black:Race,Freedom,and Law in Cuba,Louisiana,and Virginia through the Cambridge University Press. They examined three slave societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,Cuba,Virginia,and Louisiana,to explain how free and enslaved people of color used the law to gain freedom. [14] In April,she was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. [15]
During her 27 years on the USC faculty,Gross co-founded the USC Center for Law,History and Culture and the Law and Humanities Interdisciplinary Workshop for Junior Scholars. [16] In fall 2023,Gross joined UCLA School of Law as a Distinguished Professor. [16]
Dred Scott v. Sandford,60 U.S. 393 (1857),was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent,and thus they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the Constitution conferred upon American citizens. The decision is widely considered the worst in the Supreme Court's history,being widely denounced for its overt racism,perceived judicial activism,poor legal reasoning,and crucial role in the start of the American Civil War four years later. Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz said that it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions". Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes called it the Court's "greatest self-inflicted wound".
Sally Miller,born SaloméMüller,was an American woman enslaved sometime in the late 1810s,whose freedom suit in Louisiana was based on her claimed status as a free German immigrant and indentured servant born to non-enslaved parents. The case attracted wide attention and publicity because of the issue of "white" slavery. In Sally Miller v. Louis Belmonti,the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in her favor,and Miller gained freedom.
Paul Finkelman is an American legal historian. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books on American legal and constitutional history,slavery,general American history and baseball. In addition,he has authored more than 200 scholarly articles on these and many other subjects. From 2017 - 2022,Finkelman served as the President and Chancellor of Gratz College,Melrose Park,Pennsylvania.
Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic,who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA).
Twelve Years a Slave is an 1853 memoir and slave narrative by Solomon Northup as told to and written by David Wilson. Northup,a black man who was born free in New York state,details himself being tricked to go to Washington,D.C.,where he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South. He was in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana before he was able to secretly get information to friends and family in New York,who in turn secured his release with the aid of the state. Northup's account provides extensive details on the slave markets in Washington,D.C.,and New Orleans,and describes at length cotton and sugar cultivation and slave treatment on major plantations in Louisiana.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was an American historian who focused on the history of slavery in the Caribbean,Latin America,Louisiana,Africa,and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Discovering extensive French and Spanish colonial documents related to the slave trade in Louisiana,she wrote Africans in Colonial Louisiana:The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992),studied the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans brought to Louisiana,as well as the process of creolization,which created new cultures. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched and taught,adding to scholarly understanding of the diverse origins of cultures throughout the Americas.
Laura E. Gómez is a professor at the School of Law at the University of California,Los Angeles where she also holds appointments in Sociology and the Department of Chicana &Chicano Studies and Central American Studies.
Rebecca Jarvis Scott is an American historian,and Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law,at University of Michigan.
Freedom suits were lawsuits in the Thirteen Colonies and the United States filed by slaves against slaveholders to assert claims to freedom,often based on descent from a free maternal ancestor,or time held as a resident in a free state or territory.
John Punch was an enslaved African who lived in the colony of Virginia. Thought to have been an indentured servant,Punch attempted to escape to Maryland and was sentenced in July 1640 by the Virginia Governor's Council to serve as a slave for the remainder of his life. Two European men who ran away with him received a lighter sentence of extended indentured servitude. For this reason,some historians consider John Punch the "first official slave in the English colonies," and his case as the "first legal sanctioning of lifelong slavery in the Chesapeake." Some historians also consider this to be one of the first legal distinctions between Europeans and Africans made in the colony,and a key milestone in the development of the institution of slavery in the United States.
Hudgins v. Wright (1806) was a freedom suit decided in the favor of the slave Jackey Wright by the Virginia Supreme Court. She had sued for freedom for herself and her two children based on her claim of descent from Indian women. Indian slavery had been prohibited in Virginia since 1705. Since 1662,slave law had incorporated the principle of partus sequitur ventrem,saying that children born in the colony took the social status of their mothers.
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic Slave Trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practised on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7,1886.
Stuart Alan Banner is an American legal historian and the Norman Abrams Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. Banner also directs UCLA's Supreme Court Clinic,which offers students the opportunity to work on real cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Brenda Elaine Stevenson is an American historian specializing in the history of the Southern United States and African American history,particularly slavery,gender,race and race riots. She is Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History and Professor in African-American Studies at the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA). From Autumn 2021,she will be Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History at St John's College,University of Oxford.
Coartación was a system of self-paid manumission in colonial Latin American slave societies,during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. It enabled slaves to make a down payment and to set the price for their freedom,conferring on them the status of coartado,which brought extra rights and privileges to the slave. The term originally comes from the Spanish word "coartar" as meaning "to cut off" or "limit" how they would set the price for freedom and cut it off from the (rising) market price,so that the master could not ask for a higher price. But by the eighteenth century,it had become "coartación" as meaning "hindrance" or "restriction," in reference to the action of restricting the slave master's power.
Alejandro de la Fuente is an academic and art curator. He is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics,Professor of African and African American Studies and of History at Harvard University. He is also Director of Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. His research focuses on specializes in the study of comparative study of slavery and race relations.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an American historian. She is an associate professor of history at the University of California,Berkeley,and the author of They Were Her Property:White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. She is an expert in African-American history,the history of American slavery,and women's and gender history.
Martha S. Jones is an American historian and legal scholar. She is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She studies the legal and cultural history of the United States,with a particular focus on how Black Americans have shaped the history of American democracy. She has published books on the voting rights of African American women,the debates about women's rights among Black Americans in the early United States,and the development of birthright citizenship in the United States as promoted by African Americans in Baltimore before the Civil War.
Jeff Forret is an American historian and professor at Lamar University.
A prolific and award-winning writer and speaker, Gross focuses her scholarship on "the way race and slavery have shaped law, culture, and politics in the Americas – and also the way law has created the very category of 'race,' with devastating consequences.'
Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Jan., $24.95) by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross reveals how enslaved and free people of color in three major slave societies used law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their families.