Today, the
Los Angeles Review of Books has a
review of Estelle Freedman's
Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the ERA of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard University Press), and a
review of Patrick Coffey's
American Arsenal: A Century of Waging War (Oxford University Press).
There's also a
review of Lewis Perry's
Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition (Yale University Press).
"Perry goes on to delineate some of the basic rationales behind civil disobedience as well as the tensions in that reasoning. Perry seems most interested in tracing the fault lines in civil disobedience theory: moral authority versus media coverage? Individual consciousness versus higher power? Righteous law-breaking or general disorder? Civil disobedients, Perry posits, paradoxically respect the law and societal institutions (like courts) while feeling, at the same time, that they cannot acquiesce in perceived immoralities perpetrated by those same institutions. While civil disobedience is not mentioned in the Constitution — indeed, the Founding Fathers were fairly allergic to all forms of law-breaking — some people have taken the incorrect and paradoxical view that the First Amendment protects civil disobedience. But it would also be wrong to say that civil disobedience has no relationship to fundamental rights, because such individual rights are frequently the basis of civil protest movements."
Over at NewBooksInHistory.com, there is a
discussion with Aram Goudsouzian about his new book
Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
H-Net adds a
review of John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov's
Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction (University of Illinois Press).
Also on H-Net is a
review of David Allen Burke's
Atomic Testing in Mississippi: Project Dribble and the Quest for Nuclear Weapons Treaty Verification in the Cold War Era (Louisiana State University Press).
There's also a
review in the
Washington Post of
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis
(Knoft).
