The U.S. Law and Race Initiative at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is an interdisciplinary project addressing race and racialization in U.S. law and history, dedicated to understanding racialized people's use of the law to advance personhood, citizenship, rights, and sovereignty throughout American history. Funded by the Mellon Foundation and co-directed by Katrina Jagodinsky, Jeannette Eileen Jones, William G. Thomas III, and Donna D. Anderson, the project brings together a diverse interdisciplinary team of historians and legal scholars that promises to reconstitute the documentary record of U.S. case law related to race, introduce critical historical pedagogies through new curricular programs, and incorporate storytelling and subjective experience into our scholarly understandings of race and racialization across U.S. history.
Our goal is to extend the American historical imagination and to recover these stories, illuminating how ordinary people used the law to define their rights and how their actions intersected with the nation's highest politics. Such stories need telling now because Americans live in separate historical realities. Only through initiatives like this one that bring together large university teaching programs, immersive new forms of digital media content, and community partnership storytelling can we begin to connect Americans to their history in ways that repair the fractures in our national understanding.
Phase I (2023-2026)
- Develop Open Educational Resource to support higher education instruction and scholarship in U.S. Law & Race
- Produce and support community conversations and programming in U.S. Law & Race with partners at the Institute for Politics, Policy, and History, and Vision Maker Media
- Recruit and support a Research Assistant Professor to contribute to the OER and join UNL's History faculty
- Train Graduate Students in U.S. Law & Race scholarship
Phase II (2026-2029)
- Launch and promote our documentary films in partnership with Vision Maker Media
- Pursue new community partnerships for scholarly engagement
- Expand curricular reach of our undergraduate and graduate curriculum in U.S. Law & Race
- Invite scholarly collaboration and contributions to the Equality Before the Law OER
- Continue graduate student training through the Summer Fellows Program