Malka on "Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (March 2018), by Adam Malka (University at Buffalo, SUNY). A description from the Press: 

What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system’s liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery’s final decades. He argues that America’s new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them—and treating them—as criminals. The post–Civil War triumph of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized belief in black criminality.

Mass incarceration may be a recent phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the “new Jim Crow” are very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our police institutions.

A few blurbs:

“The Men of Mobtown tells a new and significant story of policing, one that accounts both for the rise of men in uniforms and for the role that private citizens, often constituted as mobs, played in regulating life on the streets of a teeming port city. Malka demonstrates how white supremacy and racism provided a cover and a rationalization for the acts of men who aimed to marginalize, if not wholly suppress, the ambitions and the lives of black city dwellers.”--Martha S. Jones 

“In this provocative history of policing in nineteenth-century Baltimore, Adam Malka demonstrates that the vexed relationship between African Americans and law enforcement is nothing new. Malka persuasively demonstrates that modern policing, never mind the prison industrial complex, was built on an older tradition of white male vigilantism disproportionately directed at African Americans. Men of Mobtown provides a much-needed historical perspective on contemporary racial injustice.”—Stephen Mihm

More information is available here.

h/t: Michael Meranze

Conference: Legal Histories of Policing and Surveillance

[We have the following announcement.]

(Wellcome Collection)

The Stanford Center for Law and History and the Stanford Humanities Center will be holding a one-day conference on "Legal Histories of Policing and Surveillance" on April 20, 2018, from 8:30 AM - 5 PM. Full schedule information is here. Seating is limited for the full-day conference and will be filled on a first come, first served basis. Registration is available here. 

The conference includes a keynote address from 4-5 PM by Professor Michael Willrich, Brandeis University History Department, entitled: "Writ of Hocus Pocus": Anarchists and the U.S. Surveillance State. Registration is not required if attending only the keynote.

Kealey on Policing Canada

Gregory S. Kealey, University of New Brunswick, published Spying on Canadians: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and the Origins of the Long Cold War with the University of Toronto Press in 2017. From the publisher: 

Award winning author Gregory S. Kealey’s study of Canada’s security and intelligence community before the end of World War II depicts a nation caught up in the Red Scare in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and tangled up with the imperial interests of first the United Kingdom and then the United States. 

Spying on Canadians brings together over twenty five years of research and writing about political policing in Canada. Through itse use of the Dominion Police and later the RCMP, Canada repressed the labour movement and the political left in defense of capital. The collection focuses on three themes; the nineteenth-century roots of political policing in Canada, the development of a national security system in the twentieth-century, and the ongoing challenges associated with research in this area owing to state secrecy and the inadequacies of access to information legislation. This timely collection alerts all Canadians to the need for the vigilant defence of civil liberties and human rights in the face of the ever increasing intrusion of the state into our private lives in the name of countersubversion and counterterrorism.

 In praise of the book:

"Canadians instantly recognize the CIA and Britain’s MI5 as dramatized in film, fiction and folklore. Popular culture overlooks our own history of domestic surveillance. Spying on Canadians turns on the lights. It is an absorbing account of a hammer in search of a nail." -Holly Doan

"Gregory S. Kealey is one of the recognized authorities in security studies. He does an excellent job in these essays of analyzing how the needs and opinions of their political masters and the nature of the perceived economic, political, and ethnic threats influenced the ideology of those who directed and implemented political policing." -Lorne Brown

"Gregory S. Kealey’s work on the history of security and, especially, the archival legwork involved in ‘digging’ for this restricted material is exceptional."-Patrizia Gentile

Further information is available here.

Oliver's "Prohibition Era and Policing"

Wesley M. Oliver, Professor of Law at Duquesne University, has published The Prohibition Era and Policing: A Legacy of Misregulation with Vanderbilt University Press.

Legal precedents created during Prohibition have lingered, leaving search-and-seizure law much better defined than limits on police use of force, interrogation practices, or eyewitness identification protocols. An unlawful trunk search is thus guarded against more thoroughly than an unnecessary shooting or a wrongful conviction.

Intrusive searches for alcohol during Prohibition destroyed middle-class Americans’ faith in police and ushered in a new basis for controlling police conduct. State courts in the 1920s began to exclude perfectly reliable evidence obtained in an illegal search. Then, as Prohibition drew to a close, a presidential commission awakened the public to torture in interrogation rooms, prompting courts to exclude coerced confessions irrespective of whether the technique had produced a reliable statement.

Prohibition’s scheme lingered long past the Roaring ‘20s. Racial tensions and police brutality were bigger concerns in the 1960s than illegal searches, yet when the Supreme Court imposed limits on officers’ conduct in 1961, searches alone were regulated. Interrogation law during the 1960s, fundamentally reshaped by the Miranda ruling, ensured that suspects who invoked their rights would not be subject to coercive tactics, but did nothing to ensure reliable confessions by those who were questioned. Explicitly recognizing that its decisions excluding evidence had not been well-received, the Court in the 1970s refused to exclude identifications merely because they were made in suggestive lineups. Perhaps a larger project awaits—refocusing our rules of criminal procedure on those concerns from which Prohibition distracted us: conviction accuracy and the use of force by police.

Here are two endorsements that matter:

“Wesley Oliver’s The Prohibition Era and Policing places him firmly within the wonderful new body of historical work that shows us how Prohibition continues to shape American law, governance, and society. Oliver does what historians do best—demonstrate how our present circumstances are profoundly shaped by our past, and how we might imagine a better future. Oliver believes that Americans deserve a more effective and more accountable criminal justice system, and uses history to help us see our present system as both contingent and changeable.”
    —Kenneth W. Mack, Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History, Harvard Law School

“Wes Oliver tells a fascinating story of criminal procedure in the early twentieth century, and he makes a novel, compelling argument for the centrality of the Prohibition Era in understanding the way the United States currently regulates the police. This is an important and provocative book.”
    —David Alan Sklansky, Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, Stanford University

Schrader Reviews Harring's "Policing a Class Society"

Stuart Schrader, a Fellow in Crime and Punishment at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, has published a three-part review of Sidney L. Harring's Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017) , in Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law.  The posts are here, here, and here.  H/t: Patrick O'Donnell.

Chin and Ormonde on the War against Chinese Restaurants

Gabriel "Jack" Chin and John Ormonde, respectively, a professor and student at the University of California, Davis School of Law, have posted The War against Chinese Restaurants, which is forthcoming in volume 67 of the Duke Law Journal:

"Oriental Dinner Menu" (NYPL)

Chinese restaurants are now a cultural fixture, as American as cherry pie. Startlingly, however, there was once a national movement to eliminate Chinese restaurants, using innovative legal methods to drive them out. Chinese restaurants were objectionable for two reasons. First, they threatened white women, who were subject to seduction by Chinese men, through intrinsic female weakness, or employment of nefarious techniques such as opium addiction. In addition, Chinese restaurants competed with “American” restaurants, thus threatening the livelihoods of white owners, cooks and servers; unions were the driving force behind the movement.

The effort was creative; Chicago used anti-Chinese zoning, Los Angeles restricted restaurant jobs to citizens, Boston authorities decreed Chinese restaurants would be denied licenses, the New York Police Department simply ordered whites out of Chinatown. Perhaps the most interesting technique was a law, endorsed by the American Federation of Labor for adoption in all jurisdictions, prohibiting white women from working in Asian restaurants. Most measures failed or were struck down. However, Asians still lost; the unions did not eliminate Chinese restaurants, but they achieved their more important goal, extending the federal policy of racial exclusion in immigration from Chinese to all Asians. The campaign is of more than historical interest. As current anti-immigration sentiments and efforts show, even today the idea that white Americans should have a privileged place in the economy, or that non-whites are culturally incongruous, persists among some.

CFP: "Traffic in Women" and International Law

[We have the following call for articles on the“'Traffic in Women' and International Law."]

Six international conventions to combat the so-called “Mädchenhandel”, “white slavery”, “traffic in women” and “human trafficking” were adopted over the course of the 20th century. During the first half of the 20th century the issue received political and public attention to a degree as to make it possible to regulate it through international law. Five of the six international conventions were adopted between 1904 and 1949, while the last one was signed only in 2000. The phenomenon of the “trafficking in women” thus was one of the first fields for the regulation through international law along with more traditional issues, such as war and peace. A joint consideration of “trafficking” and international law thus offers a promising research topic.

Nevertheless, the international law dimension has only played a minor role in historical research on “trafficking”. So far, “trafficking” has been analysed with a view towards the multiple national as well as transnational civil society efforts and initiatives to combat „Mädchenhandel“, „white slavery“ or „traffic in women“. Some analyses have situated these efforts in the context of a “moral panic” and have, in some cases, questioned the existence of the underlying phenomenon. Studies focusing on the politics and implementation of anti-trafficking initiatives in national and local contexts, concentrated on certain regions. Research focusing on practices and implementation have pointed to an intricate connection between the politics of prostitution, migration and, more generally, sexual politics. A number of studies have analysed the raced, gendered and classed dimensions of discourses, representations and politics in this field.

All these studies have pointed to core issues connected to histories of “trafficking”, such as prostitution, sexuality, migration, police, law and order as well as social and political efforts of civil society and media representations. A more general view of the research on the histories on trafficking reveals, however, a rather fragmented field, in particular with regard to the dimensions of international law, which often do not go far beyond teleological success stories of an international struggle against this “evil”.

This edited volume seeks to integrate all these aspects by approaching the field through actors and institutions: A number of actors in the fields of social and security politics, including networks of legal experts, contributed to the development and expansion of institutions to regulate “trafficking”.

Law and Colonial Violence: A Workshop Report

[We are grateful to Lia Brazil, a PhD Candidate in the history of International Law and colonial warfare at the European University Institute, Florence, for this very full report on a day-long workshop at Queen Mary University of London.]

I recently attended a workshop on ‘Law and Colonial Violence', at Queen Mary University of London, on February 14th. Organised by Boyd van Dijk (EUI/KCL), Jacob Ramsay Smith (QMUL) and Joseph McQuade (Cambridge), it drew together a diversity of speakers from the fields of history, social sciences, and law, which resulted in a fascinating day of discussion. Welcoming participants to the workshop, Ramsay Smith argued that this interdisciplinary approach intended to bring together different analyses and concepts of colonial violence and law, alongside both international human rights law, and laws of war, to enrich understanding of the formation, operation and disintegration of Empires, and their legacies. He described the wide variety of agents populating the papers, from those involved in policing the colonised state, to ‘non-official actors', including settlers, businessman, and planters, as well as indigenous actors, who often challenged the colonial state's monopoly of force.  Certain papers also highlighted the role of jurists, and Ramsay Smith argued, that they, and even the law itself, may be seen as deeply implicated in the creation and maintenance of Empire, including its utility of violence. His speech touched on many of these major themes of the conference, before finishing to reflect on how an understanding of this past may be critical for understanding aspects of modern law.

Focusing on the cases of India and Egypt, the first panel, ‘Imperial Policing, Punishment and Control' presented a coherent overview of the legal mechanisms that facilitated colonial control through violence and repression within the British Empire. Opening the session, Alastair McClure (Cambridge), addressed both the excessive forms of violence in colonial governance, such as the 1864 Whipping Act, and the growing anti-colonial response to these by Indian actors in newspapers and pamphlets. His discussion of the lexicon of imperial violence presented strong parallels with the paper by Mark Condos (QMUL), who also focused on India. Condos' analysis of the British implementation of emergency legislation in India against the perceived threat posed by ‘fanatics' and ‘terrorists' highlighted the malleability of such terms, across the colony, to permit the swift application of the law, mechanisms which he argued have a strong resonance with today's discourses. Focusing on the Egyptian case, Ifdal Elsaket (Leiden/NVIC), also pointed to fear, particularly that of revolt, as a motivation for extreme legal measures, a factor exacerbated for the British in Egypt by its geographic proximity to the Ottoman Empire during the Great War. Like Condos, her paper discussed the continuities in imperial policing laws, particularly in the case of the 1928 Assembly Law, a version of which is still applied in Egypt today. Together these papers emphasised the way law interacted with colonial society, often providing what Elsaket termed "a skeleton code" for governance, which allowed other restrictions to be fleshed out as needed. By institutionalising excessive violence or repression in the law, as ‘states of exception', measures such as executions, or ad hoc trials, could be framed with legal respectability – until such language broke down.

During the second panel, the workshop's focus broadened from domestic colonial law, to the law of wars and conquest, and here, the papers employed varied approaches to understanding the construction and application of the law.  Andrew Arsan (Cambridge) emphasised the political dimensions in the application of law internationally in his assessment of the dual restoration of justice in Ottoman Mount Lebanon in 1860 by an international commission and a French expeditionary force. His paper addressed complex layers of sovereignty, particularly the issue of Ottoman Turkey's exclusion from the law of nations, and thus, civilisation. Following this Claire Vergerio (Oxford), presented on the ‘intellectual revival' of the Italian jurist Alberico Gentili from 1874, arguing Gentili's De iure belli (1598) was also used by nineteenth century international lawyers to justify and legitimate the exclusionary nature of the laws of war. Finally, Edward Cavanagh (Cambridge) returned to the practice of warfare through conquest in the case of the 1919 Re Southern Rhodesia enquiry. Here, the existence of colonial conquest and violence at the intersection between property rights, English Common Law, and colonial corporations, such as the British South Africa Company, indicated the significance of territorial control and expansion to the construction and operation of colonial laws. Drawing these papers together, Elisabeth Leake (Leeds) placed emphasis on certain exclusionary dimensions of late nineteenth and early twentieth international law, premised on the European concept of sovereignty.

New methods and approaches to international law remained central to the discussion during the third panel, where papers explored the law as a point of contest, illuminating the existence of levels of subaltern agency, and of alternative perspectives on international law.  Therefore, when discussing the repatriation of the skull of Sultan Mkwawa - leader of the Wahehe tribe of the former German colony in South-East Africa - as part of the Treaty of Versailles, Jeremiah Garsha (Cambridge) emphasised "reading against the grain of the archives". By focusing on the language through which the skull was framed in competing legal arguments, his paper illustrated a measure of agency possessed by the colonised tribe in their ability to transverse European legal systems. Similarly, by contextualising the dissent of Radhabinod Pal at the Tokyo Trial (1946 – 1948) alongside his broader legal writings, Milinda Banerjee (Ludwig-Maxmilian University/Presidency University) pointed to the ability of a ‘global intellectual history' to explain the emergence of a discourse non-European, or what he termed, ‘subaltern sovereignty'. Situating her analysis in the context of discussions about the revision of the Geneva Conventions in the 1970s, Eleanor Davey (Manchester), explored the relationship between so-called ‘non-state actors' and emerging international humanitarian law, highlighting the role and tensions surrounding the participation of national liberation movements, and humanitarian organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the World Health Organization. Rotem Giladi's paper (Helsinki/Jerusalem), presented a novel approach to a well-worn historical subject, through an investigation of the silence of international lawyers in response to the scandal generated by the occupation of the Rhine by French colonial troops at the Great War. Explicit in his paper were two significant considerations for future research: the relationship between the civilising mission and race, and that between the law and gender.

For me, two themes were particularly resonant throughout the day. The first, the concept of ‘change and continuity' in examining law and colonial violence, was discussed in the aftermath of the first session by Kim Wagner (QMUL), who suggested that the long focus of the papers both bridged a divide between the nineteenth and twentieth century, and questioned the Great War as a point of rupture. This theme was explored again in response to the final panel by Van Dijk, who pointed to a shift in the vocabulary of colonialism after 1919 and the Paris Peace Conferences. However, he described colonialism as ‘reconfigured', not necessarily ‘overcome', and emphasised the continued legacies of Empire for international law throughout the twentieth century.    

Different notions of colonial violence and control was the second major theme, and I was struck by how it weaved its way throughout the papers, though varying in scale, discourse, and resonance. It ranged from the ‘spectacles' of extreme repressive violence permitted by colonial legislation, like those discussed by McClure and Condos in relation to British India, or the public hangings and shootings described by Arsan on Mount Lebanon, to more subtle forms, as apparent in the control over the colonised body seen in Garsha's discussion of the Wahehe skull. Examples of violence and repression through conventional warfare, and small wars, also proliferated, with particular attention to their aftermath, such as Cavanagh's study of the enquiry into the 1893 conquest in Rhodesia, or Giladi's examination of the ‘Horror on the Rhine'. Taken together, the papers therefore presented an image of the law as a mechanism for legitimising and sanctioning colonial violence, as a means of repression, control, and conquest. However, as in the last panel, they provided insight to the ways in which the norms imposed by the law could to an extent be used, re-adapted, and critiqued, by the subaltern themselves.

Ending the day, these two themes seemed unified in the keynote speech, delivered by Dirk Moses (University of Sydney) and entitled "Empire, Resistance and Security: The Law of Nations from Vitoria to Gaza". Here, in an expansive exploration of the development of the laws of occupied territory, Moses discussed the continued alignment of our international legal system, particularly international humanitarian law, with settler expansion. He argued that the legacy of Imperial mentalities remains integral to the law today, which he illustrated through reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tracing the development of the law of occupied territory through pivotal theorists of international law, including Vitoria, Vattel, Lieber, and Oppenheim, Moses showed how doctrine on the ‘right of resistance' was framed through European experience of war, and the colonial encounter. Building on discussions earlier in the day, he discussed the limits of the applicability of laws of war towards ‘uncivilised' people. Moses argued that the same understanding framed the legitimacy of resistance during WWII, ensuring only by the Geneva Conventions of 1949 did resistance in occupation receive extended, though still limited, protection.  Drawing these strands towards the present, Moses argued that the current ‘transformative occupation' of Palestinian territory by Israel is facilitated by humanitarian law's prioritisation of the security and mobility rights of colonists, over the occupied. In this instance, he argues it is possible to see within international law both the reflected asymmetries of the international system, and the residue of the unequal imperial global order of the nineteenth century. Strikingly, Moses framed his address with the writings of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer popularly remembered for coining the term genocide. Lemkin's work led to the classification of Nazi colonial practices and expansion through Lebensraum as genocide. Yet, as Moses concluded, despite these efforts, imperial legacies within international humanitarian law allow the conquest and annexation of occupied territory to remain possible today.

Concluding the day, participants engaged in a roundtable discussion, where Gerry Simpson (LSE) addressed some aspects of Moses' lecture. He agreed with international humanitarian law's capacity to facilitate violence, and questioned whether international law today can be considered egalitarian. However, Simpson also pointed to a distinction between criticism and critique of humanitarian law, and discussed the need to ‘stabilise' the law by assessing its varied sources, including its deep historical texture. Finally, he posed questions of whether it is possible in a fragmented legal universe to talk of a single international law. This awareness of the transfer of meaning across geographical contexts was also discussed during the roundtable by Wagner, who turned attention to how the terminology of ‘savagery' made certain types of violence permissible. Providing the last comments, Leake returned to the idea of sovereignty, arguing that modern international law necessitates the existence of the nation-state. She also pointed to a tension, present in many of the day's papers, between the aspirations of legal theory, and the practice of violence. This view of a fragmented, rather than homogenous, legal universe was certainly explored by panellists, who presented a complex view of the law over the last century and a half, as a mechanism for both limiting and exerting colonial aspirations and control, as well as subverting it.

A Consent Decree on the NYPD's Surveillance Activities Seeks Its Historian

[We have the following message from Rick Abel, the Connell Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA.]

 Dear Colleagues:

I am writing at the suggestion of Bob Gordon to tell you about an opportunity to research the history of what may be the oldest continuous (and still extant) consent decree against a police department. In May 1971 Jethro Eisenstein, Martin Stolar and Paul Chevigny, representing Barbara Handschu (the named plaintiff) and others, challenged the NYPD’s practices of surveilling, infiltrating and investigating groups protesting the Vietnam War by engaging in constitutionally protected activities. They obtained a consent decree in the SDNY, which is still being monitored by the court (currently by Judge Charles S. Haight Jr.). Because it has spanned many changes in the intensity and nature of political activity, 15 NYPD Commissioners, and seven NYC Mayors (from John Lindsay on), it offers a unique window into a wide range of fascinating questions. (After 9/11, for instance, the lawyers have repeatedly clashed with the NYPD and the city over surveillance of Muslims.)

Some of you may know Paul Chevigny at NYU Law School, who has written extensively about police. I became friends with Jethro more than a decade ago (through singing in a chorus with him in NY) and have discussed this amazing case with him over the years. He would welcome a historian (at any level of seniority, including a graduate student looking for a thesis topic) who wants to explore the possibility of writing about the Handschu consent decree (which you can Google, for more information). Barbara Handschu remains an engaged activist; all the original lawyers, and others who subsequently joined the team, may be willing to speak to you.

Anyone interested should contact Jethro Eisenstein of Profeta & Eisenstein in NYC. His e-mail is: jethro19@gmail.com.

Rick Abel, Connell Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA

New Release: Burney and Pemberton on CSI

Out this month from Johns Hopkins University Press is Murder and the Making of English CSI by Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton, both of the University of Manchester. From the press:

Crime scene investigation—or CSI—has captured the modern imagination. On television screens and in newspapers, we follow the exploits of forensic officers wearing protective suits and working behind police tape to identify and secure physical evidence for laboratory analysis. But where did this ensemble of investigative specialists and scientific techniques come from?

In Murder and the Making of English CSI, Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton tell the engrossing history of how, in the first half of the twentieth century, novel routines, regulations, and techniques—from chain-of-custody procedures to the analysis of hair, blood, and fiber—fundamentally transformed the processing of murder scenes. Focusing on two iconic English investigations—the 1924 case of Emily Kaye, who was beaten and dismembered by her lover at a lonely beachfront holiday cottage, and the 1953 investigation into John Christie’s serial murders in his dingy terraced home in London’s West End—Burney and Pemberton chart the emergence of the crime scene as a new space of forensic activity.

Drawing on fascinating source material ranging from how-to investigator handbooks and detective novels to crime journalism, police case reports, and courtroom transcripts, the book shows readers how, over time, the focus of murder inquiries shifted from a primarily medical and autopsy-based interest in the victim’s body to one dominated by laboratory technicians laboring over minute trace evidence. Murder and the Making of English CSI reveals the compelling and untold story of how one of the most iconic features of our present-day forensic landscape came into being. It is a must-read for forensic scientists, historians, and true crime devotees alike.

Praise after the jump.

Meares on Policing and Its Reform

On July 11, Tracey L. Meares, Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale University, delivered the 12th annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States at the Chautauqua Institution.  According to an announcement disseminated to subscribers to John Q. Barrett’s Jackson List, “Professor Meares’s lecture, entitled “Policing and Its Reform in the 21st Century,” addressed recent and historical United States events (including, beginning at 29:20, the Supreme Court’s June 20th decision in Utah v. Strieff), human experiences, academic research, psychology and communal education.”  The lecture, “preceded by brief introductions, and followed by audience questions and Meares answers,” is here.  Excerpts from “an interview that Professor Meares gave at the Robert H. Jackson Center” on July 10 are here.

Turk on US Marshals Service

David S. Turk, Historian of the US Marshals Service is coming out with Forging the Star: The Official Modern History of the United States Marshals Service (University of North Texas Press) this month. From the publisher:

What do diverse events such as the integration of the University of Mississippi, the federal trials of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, the confrontation at Ruby Ridge, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have in common? The U.S. Marshals were instrumental in all of them. Whether pursuing dangerous felons in each of the 94 judicial districts or extraditing them from other countries; protecting federal judges, prosecutors, and witnesses from threats; transporting and maintaining prisoners and detainees; or administering the sale of assets obtained from criminal activity, the U.S. Marshals Service has adapted and overcome a mountain of barriers since their founding (on September 24, 1789) as the oldest federal law enforcement organization.

In Forging the Star, historian David S. Turk lifts the fog around the agency’s complex modern period. From the inside, he allows a look within the storied organization. The research and writing of this singular account took over a decade, drawn from fresh primary source material with interviews from active or retired management, deputy U.S. marshals who witnessed major events, and the administrative personnel who supported them. Forging the Star is a comprehensive official history that will answer many questions about this legendary agency.

And a blurb: 

"Turk advances our understanding of the U.S. Marshals Service into the modern era, heretofore a time generally overlooked, and he does it admirably.” –Bob Alexander

Full information is available here.