This week's roundup is fairly scattershot. Legal History Blog readers will forgive, I hope, the expansive definition of "legal history" deployed in this week's roundup
In the Nation is a review of Karl Jacoby's The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire. Also in the publication is a review of Tara Zahra's The Great Departure: Mass Migration From Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World.
This week's New York Times has a review of We Are Not Such Things: The Murder of a Young American, a South African Township, and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation. Also in the New York Times is a review of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific.
The Washington Post includes a review of Philippe Sands' East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity. The reviewer characterizes Sands' work on the intellectual and legal histories of genocide and crimes against humanity as "engaging" but calls into question the book's normative conclusion.
There are a number of reviews of interest on H-Net. There is a review of Stephen G. Craft's American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy. Also reviewed is Roger Lowenstein's America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve. Christian G. Appy's American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity is reviewed. Marten Kinder's Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran is also reviewed.
Also on H-Net is a review of Edward Baptists's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. For historians with a globally-expansive interest in citizenship, H-Net has a review of Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative and also a review of Nationality, Citizenship and Ethno-Cultural Belonging: Preferential Membership Policies in Europe. Finally, H-Net has a review of Narendra Subramanian's Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India.
The New Yorker has published a couple of provocative review essays this week. Among them is a review of Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (White Trash is also reviewed at HNN). Also in The New Yorker is a particularly engaging and thoughtful review of Karl Jacoby's The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (this blogger assigned the essay to her Immigration History class).
The Los Angeles Review of Books has a timely review of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.
Moira Weigel's Labor of Love has attracted a review in The Guardian.
Common-Place reviews Martha Hodes' Mourning Lincoln. Also at Common-Place is a review of Margaret Ellen Newell's Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery.
In anticipation of the upcoming Rio Games, several venues have published reviews of David Goldblatt's The Games: A Global History of the Olympics. Though not directly relevant to most legal historians I know, those reviews can be found at The Washington Post and The New York Times.
