The History Roll has a review of Kurt T. Lash's The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges and Immunities of American Citizenship (Cambridge University Press)."It does not definitively settle the debate over the nascent Fourteenth Amendment’s meaning, but it should initiate a new generation of scholarly debates over the meaning of Reconstruction and the Republicans’ willingness to protect newly freed slaves."The New York Times reviews Zephyr Teachout's Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United (Harvard University Press).
Also in the NY Times is a review by Sean Wilentz of Jonathan Darman's Landside: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America (Random House).
Michael A. Ross's Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law and Justice in the Reconstruction Era (Oxford University Press) is also reviewed in the NY Times:
HNN adds a review of Edmund Fawcett's Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton University Press)."Those twists, recounted by Mr. Ross in “The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law and Justice in the Reconstruction Era,” published this week by Oxford University Press, include psychic consultations, a shadowy “House of Secret Obstetrics” and the derring-do of a crack Afro-Creole police detective versed in the latest “French” techniques — seemingly the first black detective in the United States to take part in a case that received national attention, Mr. Ross says.
The story also offers something else that was all but unheard-of in pre-Civil Rights-era trials involving African-Americans accused of crimes against whites: genuine suspense about the outcome."
New Books in American Studies interviews Anthony Santoro about his book, Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty (Northeastern University Press).
New Books in Law interviews Lynette J. Chua about her book, Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in a n Authoritarian State (Temple University Press); and New Books also talks with Joshua Fershee about his book, Energy Law: A Context and Practice Casebook (Carolina Academic Press).
