Historical Spaghetti: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

The current political climate in the United States is divisive and precarious, and it is not a historian’s job to explain it. What historians do best is look at the past, closely and contextually, to understand more about where humanity has been, which then perhaps can inform us about where we are going now . The history of the U.S. Supreme Court is a specific institution where a historian can analyze change over time in order to grasp the present and the future more effectively, especially with potential SCOTUS rulings on the horizon  with the potential to severely change America in the future. Most American historians—alas, most college graduates in the United States—should know the two famous court cases regarding segregation in America: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In his 2004 book From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality , legal historian and constitutional law expert Michael J. Klarman ut...