Sunday Book Roundup

Over at HNN there is a review of The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson's Dualistic Enlightenment by Maurizio Valsania (UVA Press).

"Valsania’s final chapter underscores Jefferson’s Darwinian moment—a “demythologizing of imagination.” Jefferson came to realize that humans—evidence comes with his letters to John Colvin (20 Sept. 1810) and John Holmes (22 Apr. 1820)—are “creatures of the present and are committed to the brutal fact of their animal survival. In a word, he admitted the brutality of expediency.” Thus, Jefferson tried to live consistently with philosophical ideals, but found the principle of self-survival to be axial, and found reason, right, law, and morality to be ancillary (149–51 and 157)."

From New Books in History is an interview with Suzanna Reiss in which she discusses We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire (University of California Press).

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman's American Umpire (Harvard University Press) is reviewed on H-Net.

"In American Umpire, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman offers a survey-style analysis of the history of both the United States and the country’s foreign policies towards the outside world. Within the work, Cobbs Hoffman presents a revisionist approach to the narratives that were discussed by the cultural and transnational historians who emerged during the early 1990s. In an attempt to shift the conversation away from the discussion of US imperial history, Cobbs Hoffman counters the anti-exceptional narratives offered by Kaplan, Kramer, Foster, Go, as well as a multitude of other academics, by arguing that the American Empire only existed from 1898 to 1946 and that the United States was “the pivot” that led the shift away from empires towards the existence of modern nation-states (pp. 13, 3)."

History Today has a review of Whistle Stop: How 31,000 Miles of Train Travel, 352 Speeches, and a Little Midwest Gumption Saved the Presidency Saved the Presidency of Harry Truman by Philip White (ForeEdge).

Also up on H-Net is a review of Lynchings in Kansas, 1850s-1932 by Harriet C. Frazier (McFarland).

"In addition, Lynchings in Kansas tends to accept the viewpoint of the mob, assuming the guilt of the lynched person, unless otherwise noted (for an especially troubling example of this, see the discussion of the white-on-black lynching of Hugh Henry in Larned in 1892, pp. 120-121). Furthermore, with the exception of cursory references to the race of the victims, the book spends remarkably little time grappling with the racist implications of the state’s white-on-black lynchings. Indeed, it seems to affirm implicitly Yost’s highly questionable declaration that “the negroes form such a small percentage of the total lynched, a ratio of one negro to four and one-half whites, that the race problem cannot be considered an especially important factor in the state.”"

Eileen Boris reviews Lisa Baldez's Defying Convention: U.S. Resistance to the UN Treaty on Women's Rights (Cambridge University Press).

"This book is a hybrid: part careful history, part policy brief. Enthusiastic advocacy for the convention does not kept Baldez from weighing opposing political arguments and divergent scholarly interpretations in a balanced manner. Her eight chapters divide into three sections: the origins of CEDAW, the evolution of its monitoring committee, and the politics of US consideration. “CEDAW matters” (p. 152), she convincingly asserts, because it has served as a touchstone for foreign policy as well as for national debates over abortion, motherhood, violence against women, and equality between the sexes. Based on a wide array of sources—including government documents (such as printed congressional hearings and State Department memos), legal cases, oral interviews, UN proceedings, memoirs, and newspaper stories—Defying Convention provides the fullest account we have of the domestic and geopolitical forces that have shaped US engagement with CEDAW."

Sunday Book Roundup

There's plenty of Fourth of July and Founding Fathers themed book reviews and even a review of our blog's founder's most recent book. Here's a quick list of book reviews for weekend reading.

• Mary Dudziak's War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press) is reviewed on H-Net. 
• In The New York Times, there is a review of By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission by Charles Murray (Crown Forum) and Wages of Rebellion by Chris Hedges (Nation). 
• Also in NYT is a review of Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle by Kristen Green (Harper).
• A third NYT review examines David K. Shipler's Freedom of Speech: Mighter Than the Sword (Knopf).
• Joseph J. Ellis's The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution (Knopf) is reviewed in the NYT here. 
• From New Books in History is an interview with Jonathan Eig about
  
  his book, The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (Norton).
• An Eye for an Eye: A Global History of Crime and Punishment by Mitchel P. Roth (Reaktion) is reviewed by History Today.
• The July issue of The Federal Lawyer is posted online. This month's reviews include one of A History of The Twentieth Century in 100 Maps by Tim Bryars and Tom Harper (University of Chicago Press). All reviews can be found here. 
• Books & Ideas reviews Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (Norton).
• Several excerpts are featured in Salon this week, including one from One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (Beacon) by Arthur Browne. 
  
• There's another excerpt from Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding (Oxford University Press) by Steven K. Green.
• H-Net has a review of African Americans in U.S. Foreign Policy: From the Era of Frederick Douglass to the Age of Obama edited by Linda Heywood, Allison Blakely, Charles Stith, and Joshua C. Yesnowitz (University of Illinois Press).
• Meredith Mason Brown's Touching America's History: From the Pequot War through World War II (Indiana University Press) is reviewed on H-Net. 
• And, Brett Rushforth's Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (UNC Press) is also reviewed on H-Net. 

Sunday Book Roundup

With recent events in mind, The New York Times has put together an annotated reading list for "Reading About the Confederacy." On H-Net, there is a review of Caroline E. Janney's Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (UNC Press).

"When analyzing the Union Cause and the Lost Cause, Janney argues, quite correctly in the mind of this reviewer, that the period from 1865 to 1880 was not a period of hibernation or incubation in Civil War memory. Both sides cultivated, advanced, and protected their own interpretations of the Civil War. Union veterans may have regarded the preservation of the Union as preeminent, but they did not overlook the centrality of slavery to the war. Black and white Union veterans “agreed that Union and emancipation served as the dual legacy of their victory” (p. 105). By so doing, they assured that a reconciliationist interpretation of the war would not come to dominate the landscape of Civil War memory. In the South, the Lost Cause fostered “the extension of Confederate nationalism that would encourage resistance and defiance for years to come” (p. 134), and rebels angrily refuted northern claims about emancipation. Both sides, Janney asserts, could embrace reunion, but not reconciliation, and “the battleground of Civil War memory remained contested” (p. 132)."

In the Washington Independent Review of Books, there is a review of Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin) by Bryan Burrough.

Yearning to read about Nixon? There's a two-book review in The New York Times covering Tim Weiner's One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (Henry Holt) and Evan Thomas's Being Nixon: A Man Divided (Random House).

Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America is glowingly reviewed on H-Net.

"Once in a blue moon a monograph comes along that both contributes decisively to an ongoing scholarly conversation and introduces its readers to a plethora of little-known documents, archives, organizations, and individuals."

There are several interesting interviews from the New Books series. For example, they talk with Andrew Hartman about his book, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press).

Another is an interview with Claire Virginia Eby, covering her work, Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press).

From New Books in American Studies is an interview with Madeline Y. Hsu, whose new book is The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press).

And yet still one more is an interview with Ted Smith, which discusses his book, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (Stanford University Press).

I want to particularly highlight We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (NYU Press) by Akinyele Omowale Umoja, as I have found his writings to be particular useful in some of my own research. The interview on New Books in History can be found here.

From The New Rambler is a review of Jeb Barnes and Thomas Burke's How Policy Shapes Politics: Rights, Courts, Litigation and the Struggle over Injury Compensation (Oxford).

Also up is a review of Brandon L. Garrett's Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations (Harvard University Press).

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."

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.

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.”"

Sunday Book Roundup

We've mentioned reviews of Jill Leovy's Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (Speigel & Grau) in previous weeks. This week there is a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books and another review in The Washington Post.

Fittingly, the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews William J. Mann's Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (Harper).

Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (Allen Lane) is reviewed in The Oxonian Review.

In administrative law you can find a comprehensive review by Jon D. Michaels of Nicholas Parrillo's Against the Profit Motive (Yale University Press) in the Harvard Law Review (available here).

There's also a review in The New Rambler of Daniel R. Ernst's Tocqueville's Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900-1940 (Oxford University Press).

"Ernst’s narrative is highly readable and strikes just the right balance among the historian’s love of detail, the lawyer’s need for conceptual organization, and the political theorist’s addiction to high-level principles."

NPR reviews David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Melville House).

There are two reviews this week of Rachel Holmes's Eleanor Marx: A Life (Bloomsbury), one in the Los Angeles Times and a second in the The Washington Post.

The Daily Beast reviews Julian Zelizer's The Fierce Urgency of Now.

H-Net adds a review of Timothy Nels Thurber's Republicans and Race: The GOP's Frayed Relationship with African Americans, 1945-1974 (University Press of Kansas).

"Thurber sets out to challenge both liberal arguments that the “Party of Lincoln” abandoned its long-standing commitment to civil rights during the 1960s, embracing a racially reactionary politics for electoral gain in the post-civil rights era, as well as conservative arguments that attempt to paint the GOP as a kind of forgotten champion of civil rights. Instead, Thurber attempts to cut a middle path between these rhetorical poles. He argues that, indeed, the Republican Party’s relationship was much more complicated than often admitted and that “Republicans exerted considerable influence over the timing and content of racial policy” throughout this period (p. 3). "

Other H-Net postings include a review of Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building edited by Brian Hosmer and Larry Nesper (SUNY Press) and a review of Ravi Malhotra and Morgan Rowe's Exploring Disability Identity and Disability Rights through Narratives: Finding a Voice of Their Own (Routledge)

Salon reviews Ed Larson's The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789 (William Morrow) in an article titled, "You have George Washington all wrong: Why he was more like Reagan or Clinton than you think."

Earlier this week we noted the release of Madison's Music: On Reading the First Amendment by Burt Neuborne (New Press). There's an excerpt from the book available now in Salon, "The First Amendment as we know it today didn't exist until the '60s."

If you can't get enough of the founders this weekend, you can find a review of David O. Stewart's Madison's Gift: Five Partnerships that Built America (Simon & Schuster) in The Washington Post.

Kimberly A. Hamlin discusses her book, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press), over on New Books in American Studies.

New Books in Law has a conversation with J. Douglas Smith about his book, On Democracy's Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought "One Person, One Vote" to the United States (Hill and Wang).

They also posted an interview with Joseph M. Gabriel in which they discuss Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press).

The Nation reviews Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala by Kirsten Weld (Duke University Press).

In other book news:

• The New Statesman celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the Feminist Library in London. 
• NPR has published a book list for Black History Month, "How Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Reading List." 
• The New Yorker has this new guide on reading posture.

Sunday Book Roundup

John Paul Stevens has a review in the latest issue of The New York Review, "Law Without History?" that examines Robert A. Katzmann's Judging Statutes (Oxford University Press). 

"In the introduction to his book Katzmann notes “the simple reality” that an enormous increase in the number of new statutes has led to a corresponding increase in the number of judicial decisions in which federal courts are called upon to interpret them as they apply in one situation or another. Now a substantial majority of the Supreme Court’s caseload involves statutory construction. And of course the work of lower federal court judges, administrative agencies, and practicing lawyers increasingly involves the interpretation of federal statutes. His topic is unquestionably important, and he has shed new light on the ongoing debate between “purposivists” and “textualists.”"

This week Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Joan Biskupic is reviewed in The New York Times.

Nick Bunker's An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (Knopf) is reviewed in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

"Everything that most of us know about the American Revolution comes from American historians because, as the old adage says, history is written by the winners. Now hear from an eloquent spokesman for the losers: Nick Bunker is a British writer who searches for the roots of the Revolution in the politics and economics of his homeland. He looks back to see “two overlapping empires,” political and commercial. In Bunker’s harsh and well-documented opinion, British politicians “valued their commercial empire more highly than the flags they had planted on the map.”"

The Washington Post has a review of Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America's Civil Rights Murders (Harvard University Press) by Renee Romano.

Jonathan Eig's The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (Norton) has been reviewed by Ann Friedman in The New Republic and reviewed by Irin Carmon for The New York Times:

"For much of the first half of the 20th century, women approached Margaret Sanger with a plea: “Do tell me the secret.” They wrote letters, too: “Doctors are men and have not had a baby so they have no pitty [sic] for a poor sick mother.” But she had no secret to not getting pregnant when you didn’t want to. By Sanger’s time, modern medicine had improved upon the crocodile dung ancient Egyptians used as vaginal plugs and the lemon half Casanova recommended as a cervical cap — but not by much. Diaphragms were faulty and ill-used. And condoms depended on men’s will, at a time when a doctor could advise a woman to sleep on her roof to avoid her husband’s advances."

There is a Q&A with Katha Pollitt about her book PRO: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (Picador) in the LA Times, and the book is also reviewed in The New York Times.

"“I never had an abortion, but my mother did. She didn’t tell me about it, but from what I pieced together after her death from a line in her F.B.I. file, which my father, the old radical, had requested along with his own, it was in 1960, so like almost all abortions back then, it was illegal.”
Thus begins “Pro,” the abortion rights manifesto by the Nation columnist, poet and red diaper baby Katha Pollitt. While parents with F.B.I. files may be exotic, her departure point is that abortion was and is not. Like six out of 10 women who get abortions today, Pollitt’s mom was already a mother when she chose to abort. Why didn’t she carry this pregnancy to term? How far along was she? Why didn’t she tell her husband? Was her practitioner good? Did a friend go with her? Pollitt doesn’t know."

Sunday Book Roundup

Public Books has added two reviews this week, both dealing with higher ed. The first is a review by Neil Gross, "The Politics of For-Profit Higher Education," which reviews Degrees of Inequality: How The Politics of Higher education Sabotaged the American Dream by Suzanne Mettler (Basic Books). The second is a review from Salamishah Tillet, "Race and Campus Rape: Equal Under The Law?", which looks at Estelle Freedman's Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard University Press).

"The rise of campus rape activism is only a small part of Stanford historian Estelle Freedman’s latest book, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, but her attention to the unique interdependence between racial justice and sexual assault activism in American political history might give us some insight into the limits and the potential of our current moment. Using extensive newspaper articles, court records, and conference reports, as well as personal letters and memoirs, Freedman covers the history of anti-rape activism in the United States and reminds us that “for almost two centuries a regionally, racially, and politically varied group of reformers has tried, in the face of formidable obstacles, to change legal understanding of rape.”"

The Washington Post reviews To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party by Heather Cox Richardson (Basic).

On H-Net, The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America: A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights (University of Pittsburgh Press) edited by Javier Corrales and Mario Pecheny is reviewed.

"The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America represents a trailblazing contribution to the study of same-sex sexuality in Latin America. Its move beyond questions of sexual identity to the politicization of that identity, disciplinary and regional breadth, attempts to include studies of lesbians and the transgendered, and publication of primary sources by activists and politicians ensure that a wide audience—scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as law and public policy—will find it useful. Several of the chapters would work well in graduate seminars, while more general pieces, as well as those by activists and politicians, will prove invaluable in undergraduate courses."

The New Republic reviews Jonathan Eig's The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (Norton).

"Jonathan Eig chronicles the decades-long effort to make that fantasy a reality. In his telling, this transformation is thanks to a unique alliance between feminists and scientists: the spotlight-seeking activist Margaret Sanger, the rebel researcher Goody Pincus, the single-minded heiress Katherine McCormick, and the photogenic family doctor John Rock. These four people provide a formula for what it takes to create scientific breakthroughs that are ahead of their time politically: an incredible amount of drive and little concern for traditional values, a willingness to flout powerful institutions and their rewards, a tremendous amount of money, and, eventually, a way to appeal to the mainstream." 

Over at New Books in American Studies Phillip Kretsedemas's Migrants and Race in the US: Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside (Routledge) is discussed.

And, from New Books in Law, there's an interview with Susan Haack about her book Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (Cambridge University Press).

Sunday Book Roundup

There is no shortage of book reviews this weekend. The new issue of Common Place is out with a review of Matthew Taylow Raffety's The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America (University of Chicago Press).

"In The Republic Afloat, Matthew Raffety uses violent encounters on merchant vessels in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War to suggest that it was on the water, not on land, that Americans settled key dimensions of federal governance and citizenship."

HNN has a review of Antiwar Dissent and Peace Action in World War I America (University Press of Nebraska) edited by Scott H. Bennett and Charles F. Howlett.

The Los Angeles Times reviews Edward E. Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Dede Hatch/Basic Books). (If you want to read The Economist's apology for its now withdrawn review of the book, look here, and read on about the controversy here.)

"Plantations ("slave labor camps," he calls them) were run with the ruthless efficiency of your average sweatshop. This ambitious new economic and social history of antebellum America suggests that the bondage of African Americans is just another chapter in the rise of the global economy."

Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry's new book Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women's Movements (Liveright) is published in an excerpt titled, "From riot grrrls to “Girls”: Tina Fey, Kathleen Hanna, Lena Dunham and the birth of an inspiring new feminism" in Salon.

H-Net's review of a new volume Law and the Utopian Imagination edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas and Martha Merrill Umphrey (Stanford University Press) asks "Law v. Utopia: Are They Mutually Exclusive?"

"This book of six essays on law and the utopian imagination is written by scholars from a wide array of disciplines, including English literature, fine arts, art history and cultural studies, political science, and legal philosophy and jurisprudence. The result is wide ranging and highly stimulating. Although the topics seem almost at odds with one other, the authors each pursue a unique tangent and tap into their particular areas of expertise to tease out exceptionally interesting logical constructions and conclusions as to the meaning and relationship of imagined utopias and legal strictures."

The New York Times reviews Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (The New Press), "a posthumously published collection of essays on “culture and society in the 20th century” by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm."

Karen Abbot's new work, Liar Temptress Soldier Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War (Harper) is reviewed in both the Washington Post (here), and in the Los Angeles Times (here). Jonathan Yardley for the Post writes,

"The role of women on both sides of the Civil War has generally received scant attention in conventional histories of the conflict, but a few women did considerably more than make bandages and tend the home fires. “War, like politics, was men’s work,” Karen Abbott writes, “and women were supposed to be among its victims, not its perpetrators. Women’s loyalty was assumed, regarded as a prime attribute of femininity itself, but now there was a question — one that would persist throughout the war — of what to do with what one Lincoln official called ‘fashionable women spies.’ Their gender provided them with both a psychological and a physical disguise; while hiding behind social mores about women’s proper roles, they could hide evidence of their treason on their very person, tucked beneath hoop skirts or tied up in their hair. Women, it seemed, were capable not only of significant acts of treason, but of executing them more deftly than men.”"

As classes start up again, some readers might be interested in the Washington Post's review of Elizabeth Green's Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach it to Everyone) (Norton). "Green describes with verve some of the key efforts to show that great teaching is a professional achievement rather than a natural ability." Green also spoke with Slate about her book this week. You can find that interview here.

Hillary Rodham Clinton reviews Henry Kissinger's latest book World Order (Penguin) for the Washington Post. (The Los Angeles Times also has a review of the book this week.)

"It is vintage Kissinger, with his singular combination of breadth and acuity along with his knack for connecting headlines to trend lines — very long trend lines in this case. He ranges from the Peace of Westphalia to the pace of microprocessing, from Sun Tzu to Talleyrand to Twitter. ... This long view can help us understand issues from Vladimir Putin’s aggression to Iran’s negotiating strategy, even as it raises the difficult question of “how divergent historic experiences and values can be shaped into a common order.”"

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has a piece by David Cole reviewing Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United by Zephyr Teachout (Harvard University Press).

Robert Cassanello's To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville (University Press of Florida) is reviewed on H-Net. In the book, Cassanello "describes black life and labor in Jacksonville from the Civil War to the Great Migration, and he illustrates how racial tensions changed in New South Jacksonville as blacks made themselves more visible in public spaces."

New Books in American Studies has interviews with two authors this week. The first is with Staci Zavattaro, discussing her book Cities for Sale: Municipalities as Public Relations and Market Firms (SUNY Press). The second interview is with Matt Grossman, discussing his book Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change Since 1945 (Oxford University Press).

Sunday Book Roundup

H-Net has posted several new reviews this week, one of which is of Edgar J. McManus and Tara Helfman's Liberty and Union: A Constitutional History of the United States (Taylor and Francis).

"In their new concise edition of Liberty and Union, Edgar J. McManus and Tara Helfman have done an admirable job of condensing what is a complicated and nuanced area of history into a “short” textbook. They focus on liberty as the cement that holds the Union together and forms the basis for constitutional development. While the book is promoted as an abridged history designed for single-semester courses, given its length and complicated material, it would be better suited for a two-semester class."

Another H-Net review is of The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment by Corrine M. McConnaughy (Cambridge).

"She argues that previous studies of the woman suffrage movement focused too closely on the suffragists and not enough on the lawmakers who actually gave women the right to vote. To fill this void, she examines the legislative process in several states to discover how and why a majority of their legislators were convinced to support woman suffrage." 

Other book reviews new on H-Net include a review of Brent Tarter's The Grandees of Government: The Origins of Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia (UVA Press), and a review of After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South edited by Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly (University Press of Florida).

"Coeditors Baker and Kelly, along with the contributors, provide an informative study of labor history in the Reconstruction South. The essays show that the working-class narrative is key to a complete understanding of the remaking of the South. Raising provocative questions about black/white relations in the labor movement, workers' responses to labor legislation, and the role of gender (especially conceptions of manhood), the work encourages additional analysis of laborers' experiences. In sum, After Slavery is enlightening scholarship on the history of labor and citizenship in the post-emancipation era."

 In The Washington Post Alice Goffman's On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (University of Chicago Press) is reviewed.

The Daily Beast reviews Jack Shuler's The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose (Public Affairs), which "features an evocative account of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, which reached its infamous nadir when 38 American Indians were hanged in public in Mankato, Minnesota. At the heart of this chronicle of the country’s “largest simultaneous execution” is a mesmerizing bit of prose that even the most jaded reader is likely to find moving."

And, The Washington Post has a review of Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women's Movements by Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry (Liveright).

"“Feminism Unfinished,” however, argues that the “wave” metaphor obscures the history of a continuous American women’s movement sustained by labor activists, civil rights advocates and ­social-reform campaigners, who may have looked placid on the surface but were paddling like hell underneath. Each of the three authors contributes a chapter to their history of American feminism, and they declare together in their prologue that “there was no period in the last century in which women were not campaigning for greater equality and freedom.” They hope that uncovering the “multiple and unfinished feminisms of the twentieth century can inspire” the women’s movements of the 21st. That’s the surprise signaled in the teasing subtitle."

A Sunday Book List: Women's Citizenship

[This is the third in a series of special book roundups. The first in the series can be found here.]

A favorite set of readings from my “major field” of American history focused on women’s citizenship. So, in this third post, I’ve gathered those into a short list. 

• Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (Basic, 2000)
• Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equality: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (University of Oxford Press, 2001)
• Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
• Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (The Free Press, 1994)
• Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (Hill & Wang, 1999)
• Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Vintage, 2003)
• Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2009)
• Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
• Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2000)
• Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale University Press, 1989)
• Sharon E. Wood, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)

Most of these books will be familiar to readers, but fewer readers may recognize Sharon Wood’s The Freedom of the Streets. Let me fix that. 

By no means a work of traditional legal history, Wood writes an intimate narrative history of a small Midwestern city in the late nineteenth century. The "book examines how women who embraced the free-labor promise took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. It also examines how the policies these women championed were transformed in the hands of men who held very different views of male sexuality and political necessity—and far greater power.” (p. 8) What I like most about the book is Wood's meticulous source work: court dockets, newspapers, tax lists, census schedules, city directories, maps, records of women’s organizations and city council records are used imaginatively and scrupulously to construct not just her argument, but also an almost palpable world for the reader to inhabit alongside the book’s actors. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Wood’s book demonstrates that “great questions can be asked in small places.” (p. 13) Here’s a review from the Journal of the History of Sexuality via JSTOR.

What other great books on women's citizenship are missing?  What would other themed reading lists on citizenship look like? For example, here’s Charles Zelden’s essential reading list on the history of election law and voting rights. I’m especially curious if anyone has a reading list on American Indian citizenship…