As I mentioned in
an earlier
post, a few years ago I decided to start assembling my own primary source
materials, tailored to the dates and coverage of my courses. (This also reduced
course costs—I post the materials via our course management system, allowing students
to print and/or view the materials online, as they like.) I initially expected the
process to be fairly straightforward; I had taught legal history courses many
times over, and thus knew what kinds
of materials would illustrate, complement, and complicate my lectures and the historical
scholarship I assigned. However, it turned out to be much more time consuming
than I had anticipated, because there’s just so much fascinating material one could assign, and it was so easy to go
down rabbit holes. Although I thought I knew what I was looking for, I kept finding
materials sources that were so intriguing that I rewrote some lectures entirely
in
order to include them.
The first and easiest
part of the task was gathering cases, statutes, and other sources I’d already
been teaching and wanted to continue using. For each, though, I now had to
decide how much of the original source to include. For example, I had long used
casebook excerpts of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Virginia statutes regarding
servitude and slavery, but there was so much rich and interesting material in
the statute books
that it was hard to figure out what to exclude. And editing nineteenth and twentieth-century
judicial opinions for an undergraduate audience required significant attention to
both length and clarity.
In other areas, I
knew only generally what I wanted (these included colonial cases involving
domestic disputes, and nineteenth-century private law cases with more
interesting fact patterns than the ones I’d been using). Without specific documents
in mind, I looked to the footnotes of relevant books and articles for ideas; I
also tried to browse online sources to the extent possible. For colonial
records, I am extremely thankful for archive.org, where it is easy to
full-text search many colonial legal reports. Here my strategy was to identify
something like Nathaniel B.
Shurtleff’s Records of the Governor and
Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, search various volumes for words like
“adultery” and “drunk,” and see what came up. (A lot.) And once I found an
interesting case, I could search the litigants’ names; I was happy (for me, of
course, not for them) whenever I found couples whose domestic strife kept them
returning to the courts. Similarly, in paging through the nineteenth-century legal
treatises available through HeinOnline (especially the Early American Case Law
and the Legal Classics collections) I found brief descriptions of and citations
to nineteenth-century tort and contract cases that seemed engaging and readily comprehensible.
Finally, I wanted to see what other kinds
of sources were out there, and I wanted to broaden my sources to showcase non-elite,
non-male, and non-white perspectives on law and legal change. Here too I looked
to the
footnotes of academic books and articles; I also went back to other people’s syllabi to see what sources they
included. (I’ve been collecting paper and electronic syllabi since I started
teaching. Online resources have significantly improved in recent years, and one
particularly useful collection of legal history can be found at the Triangle Legal
History Seminar’s website. Academic crowd-sourced reading lists of
primary and secondary sources like the Trump Syllabus 2.0
and the #CharlestonSyllabus—now
a book—are
another great resource. And The Docket
is planning a syllabus repository.)
I also browsed the
resources on Project Avalon – both its Chronology of
American History 1492-present and its more focused collections like Statutes
of the United States Concerning Native Americans – for sources of possible
interest. George Mason University’s History Matters
website also has a great set of primary sources, as does the American
Yawp (especially pre-1923). I also sat down with a pile of all of
the various American history document collections I’d accumulated via book
sales, exam copies, and free book piles in academic hallways. These included (but
were definitely not limited to) the Founders’ Constitution
(now also online); Women’s America (Linda K.
Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu,
eds.); multiple volumes of A Documentary History Of The Negro People In
The United States (Herbert Aptheker, ed.); The
Constitutional and Legal Rights of Women (Judith A. Baer and Leslie
Friedman Goldstein, eds.); The Age of Jim Crow
(ed. Jane Dailey); and the excellent but out of print Women
in American Law: From Colonial Times to the New Deal (Marlene Stein
Wortman, ed.)
At the end of the
day, of course, I found more material, and more ideas for hunting down even
more material, than I could ever use (or ask students to read). (I’ll describe
how I repurposed some of these sources for paper topics in a later post.) I
had, however, created collections that represented a broader set of voices and perspectives
and that I was excited to teach.
