Author: Charles W. McCurdy
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807825907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
The Anti-Rent movement impelled the state's governors, legislators, and judges to abolish an archaic form of land tenure at the root of the violent rent strike. Blending legal and political history, this book chronicles the largest tenant rebellion in US history. Instead of treating law and politics as dependent variables, this work highlights the ways in which law and politics shaped both the pattern of Anti- Rent violence and the drive for land reform. It explores the changing structure of legal doctrine that constrained political actors, and the effects of legal and political discourse on the strategies of the activists and their landlord antagonists. McCurdy teaches history and law at the University of Virginia. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Jonathan H. Earle
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807875775
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Taking our understanding of political antislavery into largely unexplored terrain, Jonathan H. Earle counters conventional wisdom and standard historical interpretations that view the ascendance of free-soil ideas within the antislavery movement as an explicit retreat from the goals of emancipation or even as an essentially proslavery ideology. These claims, he notes, fail to explain free soil's real contributions to the antislavery cause: its incorporation of Jacksonian ideas about property and political equality and its transformation of a struggling crusade into a mass political movement. Democratic free soilers' views on race occupied a wide spectrum, but they were able to fashion new and vital arguments against slavery and its expansion based on the party's long-standing commitment to egalitarianism and hostility to centralized power. Linking their antislavery stance to a land-reform agenda that pressed for free land for poor settlers in addition to land free of slavery, Free Soil Democrats forced major political realignments in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Democratic politicians such as David Wilmot, Marcus Morton, John Parker Hale, and even former president Martin Van Buren were transformed into antislavery leaders. As Earle shows, these political changes at the local, state, and national levels greatly intensified the looming sectional crisis and paved the way for the Civil War.
Author: Tom Lewis
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300119909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
Offers a history of the Hudson River, looking at explorers and traders, the arrival of the colonies, how it was transformed, and the landscape.
Author: Craig Livingston
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 453
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Book Description
2014 Best International Book Award, Mormon History Association For the first century of their church’s existence, Mormon observers of international events studied and cheered global revolutions as a religious exercise. As believers in divine-human co-agency, many prominent Mormons saw global revolutions as providential precursors to the imminent establishment of the terrestrial kingdom of God. French Revolutionary symbolism, socialist critiques of industrialism, American Indian nationalism, and Wilsonian internationalism all became the raw materials of Mormon millennial theologies which were sometimes barely distinguishable from secular utopianism. Many Mormon thinkers accepted secular revolutionary arguments that the old world order needed to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to clear the way for the new. In From Above and Below, author Craig Livingston tells the story of Mormon commentary on global revolutions from the European revolutions of 1848 to the collapse of Mormon faith in progress in the 1930s when revolutionary communist and fascist regimes exposed themselves as violent and repressive. As the Church bureaucratized and assimilated to mainstream American and capitalist values, Mormons became champions of the conservative view of political and social development for which they are known today. The first Mormon converts in Mexico and France, both political radicals, would scarcely recognize the arch-conservative twenty-first century Church.
Author: Immanuel Ness
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317471881
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 2832
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Book Description
This four-volume set examines every social movement in American history - from the great struggles for abolition, civil rights, and women's equality to the more specific quests for prohibition, consumer safety, unemployment insurance, and global justice.
Author: Robert F. Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190068809
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
The second edition of The Law of American State Constitutions provides complete coverage of the legal doctrines surrounding, applying to, and arising from American state constitutions and their judicial interpretation. Drawing on examples from specific states, Professors Williams and Friedman analyze the nature and function of state constitutions in contrast to the federal Constitution, including rights, separation of powers, issues of interpretation, and the processes for amendment and revision. In this edition, Williams and Friedman focus on recent developments, including the state constitutional dimensions of same-sex marriage and the reaction of state courts to U.S. Supreme Court decision making. This edition of The Law of American State Constitutions remains an important analytical tool that explains the unique character and the range of interpretive approaches to these constitutions. It covers the structure of state governments under state constitutions as well as the distribution of powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Like the first edition, this edition presents a complete picture of state constitutional law and the attributes and features that make this body of law so distinctive.
Author: Laura F. Edwards
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469619857
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447
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Book Description
In the half-century following the Revolutionary War, the logic of inequality underwent a profound transformation within the southern legal system. Drawing on extensive archival research in North and South Carolina, Laura F. Edwards illuminates those changes by revealing the importance of localized legal practice. Edwards shows that following the Revolution, the intensely local legal system favored maintaining the "peace," a concept intended to protect the social order and its patriarchal hierarchies. Ordinary people, rather than legal professionals and political leaders, were central to its workings. Those without rights--even slaves--had influence within the system because of their positions of subordination, not in spite of them. By the 1830s, however, state leaders had secured support for a more centralized system that excluded people who were not specifically granted individual rights, including women, African Americans, and the poor. Edwards concludes that the emphasis on rights affirmed and restructured existing patriarchal inequalities, giving them new life within state law with implications that affected all Americans. Placing slaves, free blacks, and white women at the center of the story, The People and Their Peace recasts traditional narratives of legal and political change and sheds light on key issues in U.S. history, including the persistence of inequality--particularly slavery--in the face of expanding democracy.
Author: Eric Cervini
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512
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Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY. INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER. New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Winner of the 2021 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. One of The Washington Post's Top 50 Nonfiction Books of 2020. From a young Harvard- and Cambridge-trained historian, and the Creator and Executive Producer of The Book of Queer (coming June 2022 to Discovery+), the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall. In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the U.S. Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him, was promptly dismissed from his government job. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back. Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents, Eric Cervini's The Deviant's War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine public battles with Congress; of FBI informants; murder; betrayal; sex; love; and ultimately victory.
Author: Jack Furniss
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807183113
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Between 1861 and 1865, northern voters fortified Abraham Lincoln’s administration as it oversaw the end of the institution of slavery and an unprecedented expansion in the size and scope of the federal government. Since the United States never considered suspending the democratic process during the Civil War, these revolutionary developments—indeed the entire war effort—depended on ballots as much as bullets. Why did civilians who, at the start of the conflict, had not anticipated or desired these transformations to their society nonetheless vote to uphold them? Jack Furniss’s Between Extremes proposes an answer to this question by revealing a potent strand of centrist politics that took hold across the Union and provided the conservative rationales that allowed most northerners to accept the war’s radical outcomes.
Author: Peter Schneck
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110253771
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with, the study argues, is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence. In examining the truth claims of legal language and rhetoric and the evidentiary procedures and protocols which are meant to stabilize these claims, literary fictions about the law aim to provide an alternative public discourse that translates the law's abstractions into exemplary stories of individual experience. Yet while literature may thus strive to institute itself as an ethical counter narrative to the law, in order to become, in Shelley’s famous phrase “the legislator of the world”, it has to face the instability of its own relation to truth. The critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction thus also and inevitably entails a negotiation of the intrinsic value of literary evidence.
