Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, birthright citizenship.

John Hopkins professor Martha Jones is a legal scholar and historian.

She's also an expert in birthright citizenship, the idea that people born in the United

States automatically become citizens.

She speaks with Dr. Josh Sharstein about where this idea came from, how it developed over

the course of American history, and how it relates to public health. Let's listen.

Professor Martha Jones, thank you so much for joining me today on Public Health on Call to talk about birthright citizenship.

I thought of you as soon as I started reading the headlines about birthright citizenship because I know you wrote a book called

Birthright Citizens. Thanks for being here. Happy to be here. I'd like to start by asking you to

introduce yourself a bit to our audience. You are not the typical guest we have on public health

on call. Oh gosh. Well, with that in mind, I can just say I am a legal and cultural

historian of the 19th and 20th century United States. Much of my work concerns the history of

the Constitution, both as a matter of law, but as a matter of lived experience. And you mentioned among the topics

that we're scone is the history of citizenship, the history of voting rights and women's rights.

And I teach at Johns Hopkins University, Homewood Campus, in the Department of History and at the

SNF Agora Institute.

Great. Let's talk about the history of birthright citizenship, because that is really the

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