In Dissent, Amy Dru Stanley reviews Alex Gourevitch's From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press)."Gourevitch explores a dissident republican tradition that developed in the century after the American Revolution, amid the contest over chattel slavery and the ascendance of industrial capitalism—a time when freedom was universalized, ex-slaves became equal citizens under the rule of law, and the wage system of labor prevailed throughout the country. And in this history he discovers a usable past for critics of modern forms of economic domination that erode public life."Bryan R. Early's Busted Sanctions: Explaining Why Economic Sanctions Fail (Stanford University Press) is reviewed on H-Net.
The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer & Fanny Hill by the Lawyer Who Defended Them (Open Road Media) by Charles Rembar is reviewed on the Los Angeles Review of Books.
New Books in History talks with Lawrence M. Friedman about his latest, The Big Trial: Law as Public Spectacle (University Press of Kansas).
They also interview David Frick about his book, Kith, Kin and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno (Cornell University Press).
"He weaves in birth, marriage and death records, litigation filed by citizens against each other, as well as guild and poor relief roles, to demonstrate the "practices of toleration" that allowed Vilnans to cross confessional boundaries and to define separate identities."
A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story by Tom Gjelten (Simon & Schuster) is reviewed in The Washington Post."Gjelten has produced a compelling and informative account of the impact of the 1965 reforms, one that is indispensable reading at a time when anti-immigrant demagoguery has again found its way onto the main stage of political discourse."The Post also has a review of Lillian Faderman's The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon & Schuster).
