Sunday Book Roundup

The Washington Post has a review of Cokie Roberts's Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868 (Harper).

Charles Murray has a new book out, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission (Crown Forum), and it is reviewed in The Washington Post.

The New York Review of Books has a piece by Jed Rakoff reviewing a report by Oliver Roeder, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and Julia Bowling, with a foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz and an executive summary by Inimai Chettiar, "What Caused the Crime Decline?".

The New Books series has an interview with Rebecca Earle, discussing her book, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America (Cambridge University Press).

Also interviewed by New Books is Amy Kittelstrom, who discusses her new work, The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition (Penguin).

Karen Paget's Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism (Yale University Press) is reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The Nation reviews William Maxwell's F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton University Press).

Salon supplies us with several excerpts this weekend, including ones from:

• Christian Hageseth's Big Weed: An Entrepreneur's High-Stakes Adventures in the Budding Legal Marijuana Business (Palsgrave Macmillan) (here).
• David Cohen and Krysten Connon's Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism (Oxford University Press) (here).
• Caroline Fredrickson's Under the Bus: How Working Women are Being Run Over (The New Press) (here).

H-Net adds a review of Mary K. Trigg's Feminism as Life's Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars (Rutgers University Press).

The New York Times has a review of The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf).

"When and how did the United States ­become a nation? This question is the core of “The Quartet.” In his customary graceful prose, Joseph J. Ellis, the author of such works of popular history as the prizewinning “Founding Brothers,” argues that the United States did not become a nation with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Rather, he says, American nationhood resulted from the creation, ­adoption and effectuation of the United States ­Constitution."

Also in the Times is a review of Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial: The Story of Hollingsworth v. Perry (Crown) by Kenji Yoshino.

John W. Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn's Social Choice and Legitimacy: The Possibilities of Impossibility (Cambridge University Press) is reviewed on The New Rambler.

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Justin Simard (Ph.D. candidate, University of Pennsylvania), who has been selected as a Baldy Postdoctoral Fellow by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy.

• History News Network interviews Logan Sawyer, Georgia Law (visiting this year at Harvard Law) at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, where he spoke about the conservative movement’s adoption of originalism.

•  Around the Symposia: Ariela Gross, USC Gould School of Law, presented From the Streets to the Courts: The Grassroots History of Race, Law and Conservatism to the Center for the Study of Law and Society, Berkeley Law, on April 20.  Three days later, William E. Forbath, University of Texas School of Law, presented on Law & Government at the Vanderbilt University Law School.  H/t: Legal Scholarship Blog.   

• Leopold and Loeb (and Tsarnaev) on JSTOR Daily. 

• In an earlier post, we noted legal history in the journals of state historical societies.  Now comes the Spring 2015 issue of Washington History, a publication of the Historical Society of Washington, DC, which includes "'Horrible Barbarity': The 1837 Murder Trial of Dorcas Allen, a Georgetown Slave."

• ICYMI: Jill Lepore, The Rule of History: Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the Hold of Time, in the April 20 issue of The New Yorker.  And over at New Books in History, Jennifer Delton, Skidmore College, discusses her Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

• "The American Historical Association has sent a letter to the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau decrying Georgia's proposed 'Religious Freedom Restoration Act,' which would establish a vendor's right to refuse goods or services to individuals based on their religion, sexual orientation, marital status, or whatever other factors might emanate from religious doctrine or practice."

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Sunday Book Roundup

The Washington Independent Review of Books reviews Steve Fraser's The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little, Brown, and Co).

Amanda Hollis-Brusky's Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Oxford) is reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

"In four topics of contention—campaign-finance regulation, state sovereignty, the Commerce Clause and the Second Amendment—Ms. Hollis-Brusky shows how members of the Federalist Society have offered incisive critiques of existing law and suggested originalist alternatives to settled interpretations."

H-Net adds several reviews of interest. There is a review of Darcy Ingram's Wildlife, Conservation and Conflict in Quebec, 1840-1914 (University of British Columbia Press).

There's also a review of Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent by Andrea Friedman (University of Massachusetts Press).

Also on H-Net is a review of Brian C. Rathbun's Diplomacy's Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East (Cornell University Press).

The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity by April J. Mayes (University Press of Florida) is reviewed here.

The final H-Net review of the week is one of Shannon Elizabeth Bell's Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice (University of Illinois Press).

In The Washington Post there is a review of The Class of '65: A Student, a Divided Town, and the Long Road to Forgiveness by Jim Auchmutey (Public Affairs).

There is an adapted excerpt of Ian Millhiser's Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted (Nation Books) in the New Republic.

Forthcoming: Kruse, One Nation Under God

Forthcoming on April 7, 2015, from Basic Books, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin Kruse. Here's the Press description: 

We’re often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the idea of “Christian America” is an invention—and a relatively recent one at that.  

As Kruse argues, the belief that America is fundamentally and formally a Christian nation originated in the 1930s when businessmen enlisted religious activists in their fight against FDR’s New Deal. Corporations from General Motors to Hilton Hotels bankrolled conservative clergymen, encouraging them to attack the New Deal as a program of “pagan statism” that perverted the central principle of Christianity: the sanctity and salvation of the individual. Their campaign for “freedom under God” culminated in the election of their close ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.  

But this apparent triumph had an ironic twist. In Eisenhower’s hands, a religious movement born in opposition to the government was transformed into one that fused faith and the federal government as never before. During the 1950s, Eisenhower revolutionized the role of religion in American political culture, inventing new traditions from inaugural prayers to the National Prayer Breakfast. Meanwhile, Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the country’s first official motto. With private groups joining in, church membership soared to an all-time high of 69%. For the first time, Americans began to think of their country as an officially Christian nation.  

During this moment, virtually all Americans—across the religious and political spectrum—believed that their country was “one nation under God.” But as Americans moved from broad generalities to the details of issues such as school prayer, cracks began to appear. Religious leaders rejected this “lowest common denomination” public religion, leaving conservative political activists to champion it alone. In Richard Nixon’s hands, a politics that conflated piety and patriotism became sole property of the right. 

Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how the unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.

Some early blurbs:

“Thorough and thought-¬provoking scholarship…Kruse reveals the marketing machine behind American godliness with authority, insight, and clarity. He illustrates key turning points along the way to provide a cohesive picture of a well-powered movement. He hands us the agenda behind the Pledge of Allegiance, ‘in God we trust,’ and other cornerstones of American patriotism. In short, he exposes the PR man behind the pious curtain.” --Library Journal, starred review 

“In this riveting book, Kevin Kruse combines the history of religion with the history of capitalism to craft an original interpretation about America’s religious identity. Revisionist in the best sense—bold, daring, and intelligent—it will change how we think about the American past.” --Andrew Preston, author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy 

“In this brilliant and iconoclastic book, Kevin M. Kruse shows how an unholy alliance of greedy businessmen, venal clergy, and conservative politicians exploited American spirituality for partisan gain. Kruse’s research is extraordinary, his prose vivid, his argument profound. One Nation Under God is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary culture in the United States.”--Ari Kelman, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning A Misplaced Massacre

More information is available here.

Sunday Book Roundup

Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information by Eva Hemmungs Wirten (Chicago University Press) is reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, without a pay-wall. 

"Intriguingly, the author suggests that the ineligibility of women to own property under French law might have shaped Curie’s perspective. “Because the law excluded her from the status of person upon which these intellectual property rights depend,” Ms. Wirtén writes, “the ‘property’ road was closed to Marie Curie. The persona road was not.”"

The Times Literary Supplement reviews The Making of the Modern Police, 1780-1914 edited by Paul Lawrence (Pickering & Chatto).

Last Sunday's The New York Times Sunday Book Review was a special issue on "The Secret Life of Money," and it included reviews of books such as The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: JM Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy by Ed Conway (Pegasus).

In The New York Review of Books reviewer Christopher Jencks asks, "The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?" when reviewing Legacies of the War on Poverty edited by Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger (Russell Sage).

Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos discuss their 2014 book, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (Oxford University Press) with the New Books series.

"What has gotten us to this point of high political polarization and high income inequality? McAdam and Kloos offer a novel answer to what divides us as a country that focuses on the role social movements have in pulling parties to the extremes or pushing parties to the middle. They argue that the post-World War II period was unusual for its low levels of social movement activities and the resulting political centrism of the 1950s. The Civil Rights movement that followed – and the related backlash politics of the Southern Democrats – pushed the parties away from the center and toward regional realignment. Along the way, activists re-wrote party voting procedures that reinforced the power of vocal minorities within each party, thereby entrenching political polarization for the decades to come."

The New Books series has other interviews to check out as well. Another is an interview with Michelle Nickerson, who discusses her book, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton University Press).

A third interview from New Books is with Linda Gordon about her recently co-written work (with Dorothy Sue Cobble and Astrid Henry), Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women's Movements (Liveright).

H-Net brings us several reviews as well. H-Net reviews Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution by James P. Byrd (Oxford University Press).

Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785-1850 by John R. Van Atta (Johns Hopkins University Press) is also reviewed.

"In Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785-1850, historian John R. Van Atta examines ideological and political debates surrounding land policy in the United States from the early Republic to the 1850s. The book is a fine discussion of the complexity and importance of policymaking at the federal level in these years. The book is well written and engagingly presented, but it overlooks some important pieces of the story."

A review of another land-use book, Sonia Hirt's Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation (Cornell University Press) is also up on H-Net.

"This is an excellent book and an impeccable introduction to American zoning for anyone interested in US city planning and urban geography. In one sense, it is a primer on US zoning theory and practice: it provides all the basic elements and history in a mercifully succinct manner in under two hundred pages. This would be an ideal book to give to a student or colleague just cutting his or her teeth in urban studies. Yet, at the same time, Sonia Hirt makes some original contributions to the field by clearly placing American practices in international and historical perspective. The book worked for me on both levels."

Last but not least, The Federal Lawyer has its April issue up online with a review by Henry Cohen of Lincoln on Law, Leadership, and Life by Jonathan W. White (Cumberland House).

"Jonathan White, the author of Lincoln on Law, Leadership, and Life, told me that he had wanted the title of this book to be Lincoln’s Advice for Lawyers, but that the publisher wished to secure a broader audience for it. Although this book is largely about Lincoln’s advice for lawyers, the broader title is legitimate, because much of Lincoln’s advice for law- yers can apply to life in general. As White writes, “Lincoln believed that the highest duty of a lawyer was to be a peacemaker in his community. Therefore, any read- er who deals with interpersonal conflict can learn from Lincoln’s insights. Indeed, Lincoln’s lessons for attorneys can apply to almost any walk of life.”"

New Release: Hollis-Brusky on the The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution

New from Oxford University Press: Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Jan. 2015), by Amanda Hollis-Brusky (Pomona College). A description from the Press:

There are few intellectual movements in modern American political history more successful than the Federalist Society. Created in 1982 to counterbalance what its founders considered a liberal legal establishment, the organization gradually evolved into the conservative legal establishment, and membership is all but required for any conservative lawyer who hopes to enter politics or the judiciary. It claims 40,000 members, including four Supreme Court Justices, dozens of federal judges, and every Republican attorney general since its inception. But its power goes even deeper.

In Ideas with Consequences, Amanda Hollis-Brusky provides the first comprehensive account of how the Federalist Society exerts its influence. Drawing from a huge trove of documents, transcripts, and interviews, she explains how the Federalist Society managed to revolutionize the jurisprudence for a wide variety of important legal issues. Many of these issues-including the extent of federal government power, the scope of the right to bear arms, and the parameters of corporate political speech-had long been considered settled. But the Federalist Society was able to upend the existing conventional wisdom, promoting constitutional theories that had previously been dismissed as ludicrously radical. As Hollis-Brusky shows, the Federalist Society provided several of the crucial ingredients needed to accomplish this constitutional revolution. It serves as a credentialing institution for conservative lawyers and judges and legitimizes novel interpretations of the constitution that employ a conservative framework. It also provides a judicial audience of like-minded peers, which prevents the well-documented phenomenon of conservative judges turning moderate after years on the bench. As a consequence, it is able to exercise enormous influence on important cases at every level.

A far-reaching analysis of some of the most controversial political and legal issues of our time, Ideas with Consequences is the essential guide to the Federalist Society at a time when its power has broader implications than ever.

A few blurbs:

"Ideas have consequences because they develop in social networks of power and influence. In this impressive work, Amanda Hollis-Brusky shows how the Federalist Society network of lawyers, judges, scholars, and activists successfully pushed American constitutional law to the right. This book is an important contribution to the study of constitutional change." --Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School

"A valuable, well-researched addition to the growing literature on the conservative legal network. Rich in detail, thoughtful in execution." --Michael Greve, George Mason University School of Law

More information is available here.

Making Your Book's Structure Serve You, Your Argument, and Your Reader

Perhaps the biggest challenge I faced with this project was that its complexity seemed unwieldy. The book has multiple intersecting story lines, including accounts of the postwar labor, civil rights, and conservative movements. It travels in and out of numerous institutions, including courts, Congress, the White House, and multiple federal agencies. And it is populated by a bevy of individuals, offices, and organizations.   

There is nothing unique about this problem. As my colleague, friend, and editor extraordinaire Sally Gordon (a.k.a. Mrs. Peppercorn) is wont to say, telling us that the past is complicated isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know.

But I may find managing this unsurprising complexity more challenging than some. A friend in graduate school once told me I was blessed with a fertile mind. This was her kind response to a paper idea I had just shared that went in at least twenty different interweaving but distinct directions; a mess of an idea in other words. She said “blessed” but she also meant “cursed.” If you’re someone like me whose mind makes things even more complicated than they already are, then you too may find managing the complexity of your material an extra challenge.

I couldn’t change my hardwiring, but for the book project I eventually came up with a strategy for managing it: structure. The dissertation had five massive and chronologically progressive chapters. As it moved through time, it jumped back and forth confusingly between actors and story lines. It was a narrative and analytic morass.

When I sat down to plan the book, I knew I was going to have to totally rewrite the dissertation. This was partly because of the book’s longer chronological sweep and because of the much larger role the right-to-work movement was going to play throughout. But I also knew that I needed a whole new approach to the history I had already covered, one that would help untangle rather than exacerbate its complexities and curb my “fertile-minded” tendencies.

As I did for other writing puzzles, I turned to books I admired for inspiration.

One of my favorite legal history books during graduate school was Barbara Welke’s Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race,Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (Cambridge University Press). Most probably know the book as a brilliant history of the late-nineteenth-century state and a field-changing examination of bureaucracy’s dark side. But the book’s structure is also ingenious. Intricately designed, Recasting American Liberty mimics the railroads about which Welke writes, complete with narrative junctions, argumentative spurs, and granular ties all of which are worth a journey on their own but which also knit together, forming an ambitious and expansive network. The book’s structure isn’t a container for Welke’s argument but a dimension of it.
Recasting American Liberty reminded me to find a structure that would advance my argument and tame my penchant for intricacy. Chronology was important to me for narrative reasons. I also wanted to make some broad historiographic points about several key periods. But I knew I couldn’t let chronology drive the book’s organization entirely.