Oast's "Institutional Slavery"

Although we didn’t realize it until quite recently, even before news about Georgetown and its slaves broke, Jennifer Oast, Associate Professor of History at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, had published (with Cambridge University Press) a book that provides some context, Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680–1860:

The traditional image of slavery begins with a master and a slave. However, not all slaves had traditional masters; some were owned instead by institutions, such as church congregations, schools, colleges, and businesses. This practice was pervasive in early Virginia; its educational, religious, and philanthropic institutions were literally built on the backs of slaves. Virginia's first industrial economy was also developed with the skilled labor of African American slaves. This book focuses on institutional slavery in Virginia as it was practiced by the Anglican and Presbyterian churches, free schools, and four universities: the College of William and Mary, Hampden-Sydney College, the University of Virginia, and Hollins College. It also examines the use of slave labor by businesses and the Commonwealth of Virginia in industrial endeavors. This is not only an account of how institutions used slavery to further their missions, but also of the slaves who belonged to institutions.

Here’s the TOC:

Introduction
1. 'Unlawful for any Christian': slave-owning Anglican churches in Virginia
2. 'The legacies of well inclin'd gentlemen': slave-owning free schools in Virginia
3. 'The worst kind of slavery': slave-owning Presbyterian churches in Virginia
4. 'So large a family as the college': slavery at the College of William and Mary
5. 'Faithful and valuable': slavery at Hampden-Sydney College, the University of Virginia, and Hollins College
6. 'To make a trifle for themselves': industries as institutional slaveholders
Conclusion.

Endersby and Horner, "Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation"

New from the University of Missouri Press: Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation, by James W. Endersby (University of Missouri) and William T. Horner (University of Missouri). A description from the Press:

In 1936, Lloyd Gaines’s application to the University of Missouri law school was denied based on his race. Gaines and the NAACP challenged the university’s decision. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first in a long line of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding race, higher education, and equal opportunity. The court case drew national headlines, and the NAACP moved Gaines to Chicago after he received death threats. Before he could attend law school, he vanished.

This is the first book to focus entirely on the Gaines case and the vital role played by the NAACP and its lawyers—including Charles Houston, known as “the man who killed Jim Crow”— who advanced a concerted strategy to produce political change. Horner and Endersby also discuss the African American newspaper journalists and editors who mobilized popular support for the NAACP’s strategy. This book uncovers an important step toward the broad acceptance of the principle that racial segregation is inherently unequal.

This is the inaugural volume in the series Studies in Constitutional Democracy, sponsored by the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.

More information is available here. 

272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown

This just in, too late to be included in the Weekend Roundup: 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown: What Does It Owe Their Descendants? is an extraordinary article in the New York Times by Rachel L. Swarns on a horrific incident in the history of Georgetown University and its consequences.

Sunday Book Roundup

Having taken last week off, there's a long list of book reviews to cover this week.

From H-Net, we've already noted Sara Mayeux's review of Felice Batlan's Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1863-1945 (Cambridge University Press).

Also up on H-Net is a review of the volume, The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes, edited by Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, Conny Roggeband, and Bert Klandermans (University of Minnesota Press).

Jennifer Thigpen's Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai'i's Pacific World (UNC Press) is reviewed here.

And, Vincent J. Intondi's African Americans against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press), is also reviewed.

From Salon comes an excerpt of Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law by David Cole (Basic). A review of the book is in The Washington Post, too. From the excerpt:

"There  is no precise way to measure the effects of these wide-ranging efforts. But nearly all of the advocates, lawyers, and activists with whom I spoke agreed that each of the developments summarized here provided an important foundation for the marriage equality campaign. They helped make it possible for Evan Wolfson to write his law school paper, and for the many initiatives that would be necessary, inside and outside of courts, before the right to marriage equality that Wolfson envisioned could be realized."

Also from Salon is a review of Adam Cohen's Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Penguin). There's also a review of Cohen's book in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

A third contribution from Salon is an excerpt from Adultery: Infidelity and the Law by Deborah Rhode (Harvard University Press).

"This is in keeping with public attitudes. Only a third of Americans believe that adultery should be a crime. Given these views, it is somewhat surprising that so many statutes remain on the books and that several have survived recent attempts at repeal. No one thinks the fight to preserve these statutes has much practical significance: the issue is symbolic. As Thurman W. Arnold observed three-quarters of a century ago, “Most unenforced criminal laws survive in order to satisfy moral objections to our established modes of conduct. They are unenforced because we want to continue our conduct, and unrepealed because we want to preserve our morals.”"

Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders by Brady Carlson (Norton & Co.) is reviewed in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

HNN has a review of Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic).

"The 2016 annual meeting for the Organization of American Historians (OAH) will feature a session focusing upon the provocative book One Nation Under God by Princeton history professor Keven M. Kruse. In One Nation Under God, Kruse argues that the idea of the United States as a Christian nation does not find its origins with the founding of the United States or the writing of the Constitution. Rather, the notion of America as specifically consecrated by God to be a beacon for liberty was the work of corporate and religious figures opposed to New Deal statism and interference with free enterprise."

Larry Cuban's Teaching History Then and Now: A Story of Stability and Change in Schools (Harvard Education Press) is also reviewed on HNN.

The New Books Network has posted two interviews since the last roundup: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal discusses Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press), and Daniel K. Williams discusses Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press).

The New York Times has a review of The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise by David K. Randall (Norton & Co.).

Last but not least, the latest issue of The Federal Lawyer is out, with reviews of Roger Lowenstein's America's Bank: The Epic Struggle To Create the Federal Reserve (Penguin), Jeffrey Amestoy's Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Harvard University Press), and Dina Gold's Stolen Legacy: Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice as Krausenstrasse 17/18 Berlin (ABA Publishing). All reviews can be found here.

Gelber, "Courtrooms and Classrooms: A Legal History of College Access, 1860−1960"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: Courtrooms and Classrooms: A Legal History of College Access, 1860−1960, by Scott M. Gelber (Wheaton College). A description from the Press:

Conventional wisdom holds that American courts historically deferred to institutions of higher learning in most matters involving student conduct and access. Historian Scott M. Gelber upends this theory, arguing that colleges and universities never really enjoyed an overriding judicial privilege.

Focusing on admissions, expulsion, and tuition litigation, Courtrooms and Classrooms reveals that judicial scrutiny of college access was especially robust during the nineteenth century, when colleges struggled to differentiate themselves from common schools that were expected to educate virtually all students. During the early twentieth century, judges deferred more consistently to academia as college enrollment surged, faculty engaged more closely with the state, and legal scholars promoted widespread respect for administrative expertise. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights activism encouraged courts to examine college access policies with renewed vigor.

Gelber explores how external phenomena—especially institutional status and political movements—influenced the shifting jurisprudence of higher education over time. He also chronicles the impact of litigation on college access policies, including the rise of selectivity and institutional differentiation, the decline of de jure segregation, the spread of contractual understandings of enrollment, and the triumph of vocational emphases.

A few blurbs:

"A stunningly original book. Nothing like this has been written in the history of higher education. Succinct and lucid, Courtrooms and Classrooms combines legal literature and arguments with materials that bring to life the historical contexts of legal cases."— Roger L. Geiger

"Scott Gelber’s new book provides a fresh analysis to confirm that history does matter when it comes to understanding higher education. Nowhere is this more so than in the complex story of classrooms and courtrooms. The issues and arguments—and decisions—on college access in the century from 1860 to 1960 have some surprising roots and remain central to the drama of who goes to college—and where—in American history. Here is yet another excellent scholarly work from an outstanding historian of higher education." — John R. Thelin

More information is available here.

Hat tip: Law & History CRN

Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs

[We’re abetting a campaign by the Consortium for Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs (CULJP) to publicize its work.]

The Consortium, formed in 2003, is an organization for colleges and universities that have interdisciplinary programs geared toward undergraduate education about law and justice in the United States and internationally. The CULJP supports and promotes Legal Studies programs, Law and Society programs, Criminal Justice and Criminology programs, programs in Law and Justice Studies, and other relevant programs. We are a clearinghouse for information about teaching in and administering these programs. More information about the Consortium is available here; information about institutional membership can be found here.

The Consortium website maintains a list of undergraduate socio-legal programs (all such programs, not just member programs); if you are at such a program, or know of a program that should be included, please email [culjp.admnstrtr@gmail.com]. We also have lots of other great teaching and advising resources here, including syllabi, primary source links, undergraduate fellowships, etc.

[We also want] to spread the word about the following Consortium awards: the Teaching Innovation Award and the Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies. The deadline for both is March 28, 2016.  Details [after the jump]; application information is available here.

Strum on Mendez v. Westminster

We’ve already noticed Philippa Strum’s book on Mendez v. Westminster.  Now comes her posting of an article on the case, “We Always Tell Our Children They are Americans": Mendez v. Westminster and the Beginning of the End of School Segregation, which originally appeared in the Journal of Supreme Court History (2014): 307-28.  She writes, “Mendez v. Westminster, decided in 1946, was the first case in which a federal court declared "separate but equal" to be unequal. Although the NAACP was not involved at the trial level, the brief it submitted on appeal became its practice brief for Brown v. Board of Education. The case led to integration of Mexican-American children in schools throughout California and the southwest.”

Keppel, "Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture"

New from Louisiana State University Press: Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation, by Ben Keppel (University of Oklahoma). A description from the Press:

Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legally sanctioned segregation in American public schools, brought issues of racial equality to the forefront of the nation’s attention. Beyond its repercussions for the educational system, the decision also heralded broad changes to concepts of justice and national identity. “Brown v. Board” and the Transformation of American Culture examines the prominent cultural figures who taught the country how to embrace new values and ideas of citizenship in the aftermath of this groundbreaking decision.

Through the lens of three cultural “first responders,” Ben Keppel tracks the creation of an American culture in which race, class, and ethnicity could cease to imply an inferior form of citizenship. Psychiatrist and social critic Robert Coles, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning studies of children and schools in desegregating regions of the country, helped citizens understand the value of the project of racial equality in the lives of regular families, both white and black. Comedian Bill Cosby leveraged his success with gentle, family-centric humor to create televised spaces that challenged the idea of whiteness as the cultural default. Public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney designed programs like Sesame Street that extended educational opportunities to impoverished children, while offering a new vision of urban life in which diverse populations coexisted in an atmosphere of harmony and mutual support.

Together, the work of these pioneering figures provided new codes of conduct and guided America through the growing pains of becoming a truly pluralistic nation. In this cultural history of the impact of Brown v. Board, Keppel paints a vivid picture of a society at once eager for and resistant to the changes ushered in by this pivotal decision. 

More information is available here.

Sunday Book Roundup

There's plenty of book reviews this weekend. To start us off, there is a review of Will Haywood's Showdown: Thurgood Marshal and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America (Knopf) in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

"The book doesn’t bring us particularly close to Marshall-the-man, but it includes a larger narrative that satisfies. This is the story of how a nation in the grip of the Vietnam War and explosive questions about race was able to move past widespread racism and accomplish what many Southern senators were absolutely opposed to — appointing a black man as a Supreme Court justice."

Also in the LA Review of Books is a review of Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning) by Marion Nestle (Oxford University Press).

Salon interviews David Pilgrim, who has new book, Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice (PM Press).

Dan Jones's Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty (Viking) is reviewed in The New York Times. 

"The snag with that uplifting tale is that, historically speaking, almost all of it is either myth or half-truth, as Dan Jones’s lively and excellent “Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty” makes clear. A best-­selling historian with a popular touch — he has written and hosted TV mini-series based on his books — Jones skirts political legend and sticks largely to what is known. He’s frank about unfilled documentary gaps and unsettled disputes of interpretation. Celebrants have made of Magna Carta a modern dawn, while deflationists have shrunk it to a passing incident. Jones avoids both extremes, aware that the story of this document has its own merits."

Jed Rakoff reviews Justice Stephen Breyer's The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities (Knopf) for the New York Review of Books.

The New Rambler posts this review of Stephen Hopgood's The Endtimes of Human Rights (Cornell University Press).

Law and Politics Book Review has posted a review from their May issue of Battleground New Jersey: Vanderbilt, Hague, and their Fight for Justice (Rutgers University Press).

"Seldom does the adoption of a new state constitution emerge from a clash of titans; but that is the story told in Nelson Johnson’s examination of the personal and political forces that cleansed New Jersey’s court system of its ancient rules and “Dickensian absurdity” (p. 5). The titans of New Jersey politics during this period were Arthur Vanderbilt—“The warrior lawyer”-- a Republican WASP from Newark; and Frank Hague, --“Celtic chieftain” – an Irish Catholic Democrat from Jersey City. Their political differences and personal hatred of one another would end with the adoption in 1947 of a new state constitution whose centerpiece, a modernized a judiciary, has been a model for judicial reformers to this day."

From H-Net is a review of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration edited by Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman (Fordham University Press).

Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press) has also been reviewed on H-Net this week.

And a third review from H-Net is of Suk-Young Kim's DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship along the Korean Border (Columbia University Press).

Sarah Vowell's Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (Riverhead) is reviewed in the New York Times. 

"And then we have Vowell, who is an ambling historian. In her latest, “Lafayette in the Somewhat United States,” Vowell wanders through the history of the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath, using Lafayette’s involvement in the war as a map, and bringing us all along in her perambulations — with occasional side trips to such modern phenomena as Colonial Williamsburg, the many protesters who have flocked to Lafayette Square across from the White House and Vowell’s curious fascination with, and fascinated curiosity about, Quaker historians. She encounters one of the breed while visiting the Brandywine Valley, where Lafayette once served with distinction even after having been wounded, and Vowell uses the episode to give a shrewd précis of what she’s about generally."

Eric Rauchway's The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (Basic Books) is reviewed in the NYT.

More economic history is found in a double review of Chicagonomics: The Evolution of Chicago Free Market Economics by Lanny Ebenstein (St. Martin's Press) and Economic Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik (Norton & Co.).

These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890-Present by Glenda Gilmore and Thomas Sugrue (Norton & Co) also gets reviewed by David Kennedy in the NYT.

"“These United States” ably documents the scope of those shifts. But disappointingly, for all its freshness of view and impatience with inherited pieties, it fails to explicate the precise causes that have driven the Republic to its current sorry state. But its rich documentation does compel a chilling reconsideration of both the past and the future: “The 20th-century history of the United States,” the authors suggest, “raises the question of whether the American dream of an expanding middle class was a historical accident.” It doesn’t get much more disturbingly revisionist than that."

Jon Meecham's Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Random House) is reviewed by the New York Times. 

New Books in History interviews Kelly Duke Bryant, who discusses her research in Education as Politics: Colonia Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s-1914 (University of Wisconsin Press).

It's not even December yet and Best Book Lists are already emerging. Here's one from The Washington Post: "Notable Nonfiction of 2015." Making the list are...

• Melvin Urofsky's Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue (Pantheon), 
• Ari Berman's Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (Farrar Straus Giroux), 
• Will Haywood's Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (Knopf), 
• Linda Horseman's Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (Harper), 
• and Kristen Green's Something Must be Done about Prince Edward County: A Family, a VIrigina Town, and  Civil Rights Battle (Harper).

Readers might also be interested in a review of Kevin Carey's The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere (Riverhead Books) in the LA Review of Books, and  a review of John Walton's The Legendary Detective: The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction (University of Chicago Press)in The Washington Independent Review of Books.

Sunday Book Roundup

This week, H-Net posted a review of Chanelle N. Rose's The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896-1968 (Louisiana State University Press).

"Rose has complicated the clichéd racial binary of activists in Miami’s long civil rights movement during the same period, 1896 to 1968. The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami is an exceptional history in at least two respects: for bestowing on black activists the full range of political tactics, and for using Miami as a case study to demonstrate how race relations have been both supported and undermined by a tri-ethnic border city dependent upon a tourist economy. On this note, Rose’s chapters on the intersections between the black liberation struggle and the postwar Latinization of Miami will make valuable reading for any graduate seminar."

Also on the subject of civil rights is an H-Net review of Aram Goudsouzian's Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March against Fear (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux).

And even more civil rights history is on HNN, with a review of Kristen Green's Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle (Harper).

Another review of Will Haygood's Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (Knopf) is publish in the Los Angeles Times.

"Haygood wisely avoids getting mired in legal jargon in a richly textured account that brings to life the political and cultural stakes involved in this confirmation fight. He does so by juxtaposing the drama of the Senate hearings with Marshall's travails as the NAACP's chief counselor. Stories of wrongly accused African Americans whom Marshall freed and civil rights workers whose killers he was unable to bring to justice reveal the elation and despair Marshall endured in serving as his people's go-to lawyer."

New Books in History talks with David Sehat about The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (Simon and Schuster).

They also interview Gregory E. O'Malley about Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (UNC Press).

A Symposium on Mendez v. Westminster

We've noted the publication of Philippa Strum's book on Mendez v. Westminster and an exhibit on the litigation in the federal courthouse in San Diego.  Now the transcript of the introductory secession of a symposium on the case is up on SSRN.  It is Mendez v. Westminster: A Living History, Michigan State Law Review 2014: 401-27, with contributions from Judge Frederick P. Aguirre, Kristi L. Bowman, Gonzalo Mendez, Sylvia Mendez, Sandra Robbie, and Philippa Strum:

School desegregation is not just a "black and white" issue, and in fact it never has been. In 1931, a county court in Lemon Grove, California ordered a school district to stop segregating its white and Latino students. Fifteen years later in 1946, a court reached the same result in Mendez v. Westminster, becoming the first federal court to order the desegregation of schools. In this piece, Gonzalo Mendez and Sylvia Mendez (both now retired) recall their experiences as the children whose parents initiated the groundbreaking Mendez litigation, and the way in which their parents remembered the litigation. Sandra Robbie, who wrote and produced the Emmy-award winning documentary about the case, discusses its historical context. Frederick Aguirre, now a judge, reflects on the legal and personal significance of the decision. Philippa Strum, author of a book about the case, considers the unique challenges and rewards of writing about school desegregation cases. Kristi Bowman facilitates these various reflections and weaves them together.

Graff on Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century

Given that legal history sits at the intersection of two disciplines, we thought the following new release may be of interest: Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), by Harvey J. Graff (Ohio State University). Here's a description from the Press:

Interdisciplinarity—or the interrelationships among distinct fields, disciplines, or branches of knowledge in pursuit of new answers to pressing problems—is one of the most contested topics in higher education today. Some see it as a way to break down the silos of academic departments and foster creative interchange, while others view it as a destructive force that will diminish academic quality and destroy the university as we know it. In Undisciplining Knowledge, acclaimed scholar Harvey J. Graff presents readers with the first comparative and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives in the modern university. Arranged chronologically, the book tells the engaging story of how various academic fields both embraced and fought off efforts to share knowledge with other scholars. It is a story of myths, exaggerations, and misunderstandings, on all sides.

Touching on a wide variety of disciplines—including genetic biology, sociology, the humanities, communications, social relations, operations research, cognitive science, materials science, nanotechnology, cultural studies, literary studies, and biosciences—the book examines the ideals, theories, and practices of interdisciplinarity through comparative case studies. Graff interweaves this narrative with a social, institutional, and intellectual history of interdisciplinary efforts over the 140 years of the modern university, focusing on both its implementation and evolution while exploring substantial differences in definitions, goals, institutional locations, and modes of organization across different areas of focus.

Scholars across the disciplines, specialists in higher education, administrators, and interested readers will find the book’s multiple perspectives and practical advice on building and operating—and avoiding fallacies and errors—in interdisciplinary research and education invaluable.

More information is available here.

Hat tip: Chronicle of Higher Education "Selected New Books on Higher Education"

Orfield on "Milliken, Meredith, and Metropolitan Segregation"

The UCLA Law Review recently published an article of interest: "Milliken, Meredith, and Metropolitan Segregation," by Myron Orfield (University of Minnesota). Here's the abstract:

Over the last sixty years, the courts, Congress, and the President—but mostly the courts—first increased integration in schools and neighborhoods, and then changed course, allowing schools to resegregate. The impact of these decisions is illustrated by the comparative legal histories of Detroit and Louisville, two cities which demonstrate the many benefits of metropolitan-level cooperation on issues of racial segregation, and the harms that arise in its absence. Detroit, Michigan, and Louisville, Kentucky, both emerged from the riots of the 1960s equally segregated in their schools and neighborhoods with proportionally sized racial ghettoes. In 1974-75, the Supreme Court overturned a proposed metropolitan school integration plan in Detroit, but allowed a metropolitan remedy for Louisville-Jefferson schools to stand. Since that time, Louisville-Jefferson schools and neighborhoods, like all the regions with metropolitan plans, have become among the most integrated in the nation, while Detroit’s schools have remained rigidly segregated and its racial ghetto has dramatically expanded. Detroit’s experience is very common in the highly fragmented metropolitan areas of the midwestern and northeastern United States. Black students in Louisville-Jefferson outperform black students in Detroit by substantial margins on standardized tests. Metropolitan Louisville has also grown healthier economically, while the City of Detroit went bankrupt and both the city and school district were taken over by state authorities. The Article concludes with a call to modernize American local government law by strengthening the legal concepts of metropolitan jurisdictional interdependence and metropolitan citizenship.

Hat tip: Poverty Law

Sunday Book Roundup

Greetings from The Terrace at the University of Wisconsin, Madison--quite possibly the happiest place to finish up a Sunday Book Roundup after a week in the archives!

Up on H-Net is a review of Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction by Jack A. Goldstone (Oxford University Press).

Another review from H-Net is of Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism by Sarah L. Silkey (University of Georgia Press).

Common-Place has a new special July issue out with four (!) reviews. The first is a review of Thomas P. Slaughter's Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution (Hill & Wang).

"Rather than writing an extended brief for Slaughter's contentions, Independence provides a broad and yet selective sweep of the history of the thirteen colonies that became the original United States. The challenge for any author is that there is no best way to cover that much time and space in a straightforward story. Slaughter decides on a more episodic approach, nonetheless managing to weave in a great many incidents and issues that serve as pieces to the puzzle."

Also in the new July issue is a review of Corinne T. Field's The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (UNC Press).

"If you are not currently convinced that age should be a historical category of analysis alongside gender, race, class, and disability, Corinne Field's new book should go a long way toward persuading you. The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America advances the study of citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States by showing how the political significance of maturity and adulthood were at the center of women's and African Americans' efforts to expand democracy to its full meaning and potential."

The third review from Common-Place is a review of Matthew Garrett's Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form After the Constitution (Oxford University Press), which

"explores the complex textures that resulted when the post-constitutional moment's consolidating energies found verbal expression in the fragmentary form of the period's literary production. The book is a "microstructural or subgeneric literary history" (88). It follows the episode—an "integral, but also extractable unit of any narrative" across a range of genres: political essay, memoir, novel, and miscellany (3). As Garrett argues in his lucid introduction, the episode is a dialectical form, "a part that exists as such only in relation to a real or implied whole" (4). This mediating between the one and the many makes the episode an especially rich site for analyzing the politics of form in the early nation."

Lastly, Jenna M. Gibbs's Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850 (Johns Hopkins University Press) is reviewed in Common-Place as well.

"Jenna Gibbs's Performing the Temple of Liberty begins with a fanciful invitation to the reader to accompany her on a "stroll along the Thames River," past the scene of slaves being led to ships that will transport them for sale overseas, towards taverns and coffeehouses where Londoners might have been discussing the Haymarket Theatre's current production of Colman's Inkle and Yarico. She juxtaposes these two images—shackled black bodies en route to the Americas with a play featuring white bodies in blackface debating the moral evils of slavery—to offer a point of entry into her larger subject: a comparative study of performance culture and abolitionism in London and Philadelphia during the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century."

As usual, the New Books series has posted several interesting interviews this week, including an interview with Megan Threlkeld about her book, Pan-American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Also interviewed is William Elliot III and Melinda Lewis, who discuss their book, The Real College Debt Crisis: How Student Borrowing Threatens Financial Well-Being and Erodes the American Dream (Praeger).

Kyle Volk, author of Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford University Press) is interviewed, too.

"His book ... provides a compelling narrative of how nineteenth-century Americans negotiated the tension between majority rule and minority rights and between representative democracy and popular democracy. He focuses on debates in the antebellum northern states where moral reform efforts of Sabbatarians, temperance activist, and racial segregationists circumvented representative government to assert their social vision through direct majority rule."

HNN has posted a review of David Sehat's The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (Simon & Schuster).

And finally, in a piece titled, "How NASA advanced the cause of African Americans during the Civil Rights movement," Richard Paul and Steven Moss's We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program (University of Texas Press) is reviewed in The Washington Post.

Sunday Book Roundup

There's no shortage of book reviews to read this weekend! To start with, The New Rambler reviews Naomi Murakawa's The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford University Press).

"Naomi Murakawa, a political scientist and associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton, has written an interesting book that blames both features on American liberals—in particular Harry Truman, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Clinton (and Lyndon Johnson and Joe Biden)—and American liberalism. In The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison American, Murakawa takes as her target a conventional wisdom that explains the rise of mass incarceration as a victory of Republican law-and-order over Democratic civil rights. Rather, she argues, starting right in her subtitle, “liberals built prison America.” It was liberals, she claims, who “established a law-and-order mandate: build a better carceral state, one strong enough to control racial violence in the streets and regimented enough to control racial bias in criminal justice administration.” (page 3)"

Michael Signer's Becoming Madison: The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father (PublicAffairs) is excerpted in The Daily Beast.

H-Net adds a review of The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars by Joshua C. Wilson (Stanford University Press).

"Firstly, he attempts to develop these stories through the lens of "movement-countermovement" analysis whereby he analyzes "how directly competing movements interact with one another—and possibly with a more traditional entity like the state—in a dynamic process where each movement in part creates the conditions within which the other acts" (p. 10). At the same time, he sets out to understand what we can learn about these stories regarding questions raised by traditional "legal consciousness" research, including "determining if and how law mattered for those involved in these disputes; how their stories may or may not reproduce, challenge, or amend legal power and state authority; ... and how their conceptions of law affect the ongoing politics of abortion" (p. 111). Lastly, Wilson includes the perspective of a group of participants in these legal conflicts that is often explicitly excluded in traditional legal consciousness research: state legal insiders or legal "elites," specifically lawyers, legislators, and amicus brief authors. Overall, this book achieves the ambitious goals it sets for itself in that it engages with and furthers two types of socio-legal-historical research: movement-countermovement literature and legal consciousness literature. Nonetheless, certain aspects of the conclusions reached by Wilson raise questions and leave room for further analysis."

More on culture wars and rights can be found in a review of Andrew Hartman's A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press) in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Still yearning for yet more Magna Carta talk? The Los Angeles Review of Books has a multi-book review including Magna Carta and the Rule of Law by Roy Edmund Browned II, Andrea Martinez, Daniel Barstow Magraw (American Bar Association); In the Shadow of the Great Charter: Common Law Constitutionalism and the Magna Carta by Robert M. Pallitto (University Press of Kansas); King John and the Road to Magna Carta by Stephen Church (Basic); and Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015 by Nicholas Vincent (Third Millennium).

"The deeper that one goes in studying Magna Carta, beyond the uncritical and largely superficial treatment it receives in high school and popular culture, the more one begins to understand that it is the myth and the reinterpretation of Magna Carta over time that have influenced later generations far more than what actually happened in June 1215."

Also in the LA Review of Books is a review of Steve Inskeep's Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab (Penguin).

History Today reviews Don H. Doyle's The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (Basic).

The New York Review of Books adds a couple of reviews of interest, including one of Chen Guangcheng's The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man's Fight for Justice and Freedom in China (Henry Holt).

There's also a multi-book review titled, "Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality," that takes up many works, including, Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream by Suzanne Mettler (Basic); The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem by Joel Best and Eric Best (University of California Press); Financing American Higher Education in the Era of Globalization by William Zumeta, David W. Breneman, Patrick M. Callan, and Joni E. Finney (Harvard Education Press); Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education by William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin (Princeton University Press); Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality by Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton (Harvard University Press); and Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (University of Chicago Press). Here's a bit of the review:

"All in all, despite an emerging recognition that we must change course, the story told in the books under review is a dispiriting one. Mettler attributes the decline of educational opportunity since the 1980s to a failure of “upkeep,” by which she means the failure of government to renew and adapt policies from the past in order to advance their original purposes in the present and future. This strikes me as a generous explanation. The truth may be uglier. Perhaps concern for the poor has shriveled not only among policymakers but in the broader public. Perhaps in our time of focus on the wealthy elite and the shrinking middle class, there is a diminished general will to regard poor Americans as worthy of what are sometimes called “the blessings of American life”—among which the right to education has always been high if not paramount."

In The New York Times, Ryan Gatos's novel, All Involved (Harper Collins), is reviewed.

"Gattis’s premise is provocative: In the six days following the verdict of April 29, 1992, that acquitted three white police officers of using excessive force on Rodney King, the Los Angeles Police Department was so focused on the most violent manifestations of civil unrest that much of the rest of the city went unregulated. “All Involved” consists of 17 different perspectives, a majority of which issue from characters who have all been involved in some manner of illegal activity. As their neighborhood, Lynwood, plunges into general lawlessness because the police are struggling elsewhere, the path becomes clear for these individuals to go extra rogue, settling scores that mostly revolve around revenge and betrayal."

With Politics & Prose Joseph Ellis discusses The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 (Knopf).

Geraldo L. Cadava discusses his Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Harvard University Press) with New Books in American Studies.

The New York Times has curated a list of fiction and nonfiction works for those interested in "Reading About Racial Boundaries."

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.

Weekend Roundup

Hong Yen Chang (credit)

• The California Supreme Court’s reversal on Monday of its 1890 decision denying Hong Yen Chang’s application to the bar generated several news reports, including one in the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, the Yale Alumni Magazine, and on NPR.  UC Davis Law's APALSA student group describes the work of  its Hong Yen Chang Project, in advocating for the reversal here. 

• On Monday, April 20, the Lewis & Clark Community College, Godfrey, Illinois, will host a session in the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission’s History on Trial series devoted to the Alton School Cases, “a series of seven circuit court trials and five Illinois Supreme Court appeals from 1897 to 1908, in which Scott Bibb, an African-American father of two school-age children, resisted the newly imposed racial segregation in the Alton school system.” More and hat tip: Riverbender.com

• Over at her Wartime blog, LHB Founder Mary Dudziak reflects on Edward S. Corwin's notion of "totality" in his book on the World War II state, Total War and the Constitution.

• A study of the legal history of Clermont County, Kansas, is underway, according to this report  in the Clermont Sun.

• On May 1, the Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society will open its thirteenth (virtual) gallery.  Curated by Teresa Koncick, The Open Door: Roles of Women in Securities Regulation “looks at the roles and progressive participation of women in two key and contemporaneous regulatory agencies–the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the National Association of Securities Dealers (now FINRA)–from the 1930s to the 2000s.”

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

Sunday Book Roundup

H-Net adds a review of Roger Daniels's The Japanese American Cases: The Rule of Law in Time of War (University Press of Kansas).

"While his earlier work examines the internment process and events primarily during the Second World War and briefly recalls the redress after the war, Daniels’s most recent work describes in detail Japanese Americans’ legal battles during and after the Second World War and the progression of the Japanese community in American society to the present day."

Also up on H-Net is a review of David La Vere's Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies (UNC Press).

Jessica Mathews's "The Road from Westphalia" reviews Henry Kissinger's World Order (Penguin) and Bret Stephens America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Social Disorder (Sentinel) in The New York Review of Books.

The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Henry A. Giroux's Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education (Haymarket Books).

"HENRY GIROUX correctly sees that universities, at their best, prepare students for a citizen’s role that is informed, critical, and visionary. He views the goal of neoliberalism, by contrast, as cultivating education that prepares the student to be a reflexive supporter of the status quo, take orders uncritically, and accept consumerism as a major desire and goal in public and private life."

There is an excerpt from They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy by Robert Scheer (Nation) in Salon.

Margaret Jacobs discusses her new book, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Post-War World (University of Nebraska Press), with New Books in American Studies.

The Guardian reviews The End of Apartheid: Diary of a Revolution by Robin Renwick (Biteback).

Seana Shiffrin discusses Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law (Princeton University Press) with New Books in Law.

Eric Posner reviews Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War by Isabel V. Hull (Cornell University Press) in The New Rambler.

"Hull’s key point is that for all that, governments—or officials within the governments—spent countless hours debating the minutiae of international law. Even the Germans did. Indeed, Hollweg himself acknowledged that Germany had committed an injustice by invading Belgium and announced that Germany would “seek to make [the injustice] good as soon as our military goal is reached.” (p. 44). That these debates frequently occurred in confidential meetings inside governments suggest that officials took the law seriously, and didn’t just trot out arguments to rationalize actions that they had decided on for military reasons."

There are two reviews of Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster): one in The Washington Post here, and a second in The New York Times here.

Chen Guangcheng's memoir, The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man's Fight for Justice and Freedom in China (Henry Holt) is reviewed in The Washington Post.

The Nation has a multi-book review titled, "The Great Chastening," reviewing Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (Farrar Straus Giroux), John Dunn's Breaking Democracy's Spell (Yale University Press), Dan Ernst's Tocqueville's Nightmare (Oxford University Press), and Eric Nelson's The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Belknap).