Browse

According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family

Angela Onwuachi-Willig

This book looks at what it means to be a multiracial couple in the United States today. It begins with a look back at a 1925 case in which a two-month marriage ends with a man suing his wife for ... More

This book looks at what it means to be a multiracial couple in the United States today. It begins with a look back at a 1925 case in which a two-month marriage ends with a man suing his wife for misrepresentation of her race, and shows how our society has yet to come to terms with interracial marriage. The book examines this issue by drawing from a variety of sources, including personal experiences. It argues that housing law, family law, and employment law fail, in important ways, to protect multiracial couples. In a society in which marriage is used to give, withhold, and take away status—in the workplace and elsewhere—the book says interracial couples are at a disadvantage, which is only exacerbated by current law.Less

Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco

Jessica M. Marglin

This book presents a previously untold story of Jewish-Muslim relations in modern Morocco, showing how law facilitated Jews' integration into the broader Moroccan society in which they lived. Morocco ... More

This book presents a previously untold story of Jewish-Muslim relations in modern Morocco, showing how law facilitated Jews' integration into the broader Moroccan society in which they lived. Morocco went through immense upheaval in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the experiences of a single Jewish family, the book charts how the law helped Jews to integrate into Muslim society—until colonial reforms abruptly curtailed their legal mobility. Drawing on a broad range of archival documents, the book expands our understanding of contemporary relations between Jews and Muslims and changes the way we think about Jewish history, the Middle East, and the nature of legal pluralism.Less

All the Trees of the Forest: Israel's Woodlands from the Bible to the Present

Alon Tal

This book provides a detailed account of Israeli forests, tracing their history from the Bible to the present, and outlines the effort to transform drylands and degraded soils into prosperous parks, ... More

This book provides a detailed account of Israeli forests, tracing their history from the Bible to the present, and outlines the effort to transform drylands and degraded soils into prosperous parks, rangelands, and ecosystems. The book's description of Israel's trials and errors, and its exploration of both the environmental history and the current policy dilemmas surrounding that country'ss forests, hope to provide valuable lessons in the years to come for other parts of the world seeking to reestablish timberlands.Less

The Allure of the Archives

Arlette Farge

Le Goût de l'archive is widely regarded as a historiographical classic. While combing through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, the author was struck by the ... More

Le Goût de l'archive is widely regarded as a historiographical classic. While combing through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, the author was struck by the extraordinarily intimate portrayal they provided of the lives of the poor in pre-Revolutionary France, especially women. She was seduced by the sensuality of old manuscripts and by the revelatory power of voices otherwise lost. This book conveys the exhilaration of uncovering hidden secrets and the thrill of venturing into new dimensions of the past. Originally published in 1989, this classic work communicates the tactile, interpretive, and emotional experience of archival research while sharing astonishing details about life under the Old Regime in France.Less

Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone

Ruma Chopra

In spring 1796, after eight months of war in the mountainous terrain of Jamaica, most of the village of Trelawney Town—a community of about 550 runaway slaves and their descendants—surrendered. They ... More

In spring 1796, after eight months of war in the mountainous terrain of Jamaica, most of the village of Trelawney Town—a community of about 550 runaway slaves and their descendants—surrendered. They had resisted black militia and British regulars but they were frightened by the savagery of the bloodhounds imported from Cuba to defeat them. They could not have imagined the outcome that followed. The Jamaican government, fearing that the Maroon War would trigger a second Haitian Revolution, deported the Maroon families to a remote location from whence they could never return home – Nova Scotia. After four years of enduring Halifax, the Maroons were sent to the West African colony in Sierra Leone. Remarkably, some returned home in the 1840s after the British Empire abolished slavery. The insurrection in Jamaica, the deportation it triggered, and the far-reaching impact of a small group of refugees together comprise one of the earliest instances of community displacement. Yet, remarkably, although the Maroons did not choose their initial place of exile, they actively determined the next one. The Maroon rebels of Jamaica transformed into protected refugees in Nova Scotia and empire builders in Africa. During an era of British abolitionism and global expansion, a small group of black insurrectionists maneuvered on a world stage. In each British zone, the Maroons brought to bear the full range of their cultural and military experience. Their remarkable adaptations form the crux of this book.Less

The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History

Richard Lyman Bushman

The book argues that all eighteenth-century farmers sought first and foremost to provide basic subsistence for their families. The first aim of all farmers was self-provisioning. Even large planters ... More

The book argues that all eighteenth-century farmers sought first and foremost to provide basic subsistence for their families. The first aim of all farmers was self-provisioning. Even large planters who exported tobacco or wheat and purchased luxuries sought to provision themselves with their own labor on their own land. All farmers also engaged in trade to obtain what they could not make for themselves. They were subsistence and market farmers at the same time. Besides providing for themselves year by year, farmers hoped to set up their children on farms. With older children coming into the workforce, farmers could acquire enough to provide for those children as they left the family. Tragically, family farming with its assurance of security required ever more land, resulting in the relentless expulsion of Native Americans from their possessions. Within this basic North American farming system, agricultural regimens differed greatly from section to section. Slavery prevailed from Georgia to Maryland because warm winters allowed farmers to use their work force all year around, justifying the cost of slaves. From Pennsylvania northward, farmers relied on family or on cottagers who could be dismissed in winter.The cultural and political division between North and South corresponded to the contours of the climate-based growing season. This agricultural system changed little until after 1800, when the growing urban populations motivated farmers to develop new and more profitable crops. Farmers benefited from expanding markets which enabled them to purchase the goods necessary to achieve middle-class respectability. Although gradually eroded, self-provisioning persisted until after World War II, when it was largely abandoned.Less

American Lynching

Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

This book explains how lynching arose precisely out of an ideology of the sense of the rights accrued to someone possessing democratic freedom, and the sense that those rights were directly and ... More

This book explains how lynching arose precisely out of an ideology of the sense of the rights accrued to someone possessing democratic freedom, and the sense that those rights were directly and formally a product of the earliest and most essential mandates of a slave society. Lynching can be broadly defined as the extralegal pursuit of vengeance against an offender of communal moral standards. The rationales and justifications that lynchers and their apologists produced to tease out the defenses of lynching reveal about American political discourse of all kinds are examined in this book. The most recent manifestations of the American political discourse has been African American public figures who have described their political ordeals as a high-technology lynching, and media coverage of a legal indictment for perjury as exhibiting an unethical, illegal lynch mob mentality. In more regular ways, frequent metaphorical employments of lynching are used as a way of terrorizing black Americans. The book demonstrates that the practice of lynching in American history is not only shameful but also central, and recognizes the ways in which lynching is both a metaphor and literal continues to haunt the republic.Less

American Zion

Eran Shalev

The Bible has always been an integral part of American political culture. Yet in the years before the Civil War, it was the Old Testament, not the New Testament, that pervaded political rhetoric. ... More

The Bible has always been an integral part of American political culture. Yet in the years before the Civil War, it was the Old Testament, not the New Testament, that pervaded political rhetoric. From Revolutionary times through about 1830, numerous American politicians, commentators, ministers, and laymen depicted their young nation as a new, God-chosen Israel and relied on the Old Testament for political guidance. This book closely examines how this powerful predilection for Old Testament narratives and rhetoric in early America shaped a wide range of debates and cultural discussions—from republican ideology, constitutional interpretation, southern slavery, and, more generally, the meaning of American nationalism to speculations on the origins of American Indians and to the emergence of Mormonism. The author argues that the effort to shape the United States as a biblical nation reflected conflicting attitudes within the culture—proudly boastful on the one hand but uncertain about its abilities and ultimate destiny on the other. This book explores the meaning and lasting effects of the idea of the United States as a new Israel, and sheds new light on our understanding of the nation's origins and culture during the founding and antebellum decades.Less

Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling

Benjamin N Lawrance

The lives of six African children, ages nine to sixteen, were forever altered by the revolt aboard the Cuban schooner La Amistad in 1839. Like their adult companions, all were captured in Africa and ... More

The lives of six African children, ages nine to sixteen, were forever altered by the revolt aboard the Cuban schooner La Amistad in 1839. Like their adult companions, all were captured in Africa and illegally sold as slaves. In this fascinating revisionist history, the author reconstructs six entwined stories and brings them to the forefront of the Amistad conflict. Through eyewitness testimonies, court records, and the children's own letters, the author recounts how their lives were inextricably interwoven by the historic drama, and casts new light on illegal nineteenth-century transatlantic slave smuggling.Less

Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions

Kenneth Stow

This text presents an historical interpretation of the diary of an eighteenth-century Jewish woman who resisted the efforts of the papal authorities to force her religious conversion. After being ... More

This text presents an historical interpretation of the diary of an eighteenth-century Jewish woman who resisted the efforts of the papal authorities to force her religious conversion. After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors' efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna's powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793, receives its first English-language translation along with an insightful interpretation in this book of the incident's legal and historical significance. The book's analysis of Anna's dramatic story of prejudice, injustice, resistance, and survival during her two-week imprisonment in the Roman House of Converts—and her brother's later efforts to protest state-sanctioned, religion-based abuses—provides a detailed view of the separate forces on either side of the struggle between religious and civil law in the years just prior to the massive political and social upheavals in America and Europe.Less

The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

This book explores the Jewish contribution to, and integration with, Ukrainian culture, focusing on five writers and poets of Jewish descent whose literary activities span the 1880s to the 1990s. ... More

This book explores the Jewish contribution to, and integration with, Ukrainian culture, focusing on five writers and poets of Jewish descent whose literary activities span the 1880s to the 1990s. Unlike their East European contemporaries—who disparaged the culture of Ukraine as second-rate, stateless, and colonial—these individuals embraced the Russian- and Soviet-dominated Ukrainian community, incorporating their Jewish concerns in their Ukrainian-language writings. The author argues that the marginality of these literati as Jews fuelled their sympathy toward Ukrainians and their national cause. Providing extensive historical background, biographical detail, and analysis of each writer's poetry and prose, he shows how a Ukrainian-Jewish literary tradition emerged. Along the way, the author challenges assumptions about modern Jewish acculturation and Ukrainian–Jewish relations.Less

Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy

William A. Galston

The Great Recession, institutional dysfunction, a growing divide between urban and rural prospects, and failed efforts to effectively address immigration have paved the way for a populist backlash ... More

The Great Recession, institutional dysfunction, a growing divide between urban and rural prospects, and failed efforts to effectively address immigration have paved the way for a populist backlash that disrupts the postwar bargain between political elites and citizens. Whether today's populism represents a corrective to unfair and obsolete policies or a threat to liberal democracy itself remains up for debate. Yet this much is clear: these challenges indict the triumphalism that accompanied liberal democratic consolidation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. To respond to today's crisis, good leaders must strive for inclusive economic growth while addressing fraught social and cultural issues, including demographic anxiety, with frank attention. Although reforms may stem the populist tide, liberal democratic life will always leave some citizens unsatisfied. This is a permanent source of vulnerability, but liberal democracy will endure so long as citizens believe it is worth fighting for.Less

Archaeology at La Isabela: America's First European Town

Kathleen Deagan and Jose Maria Cruxent

This book presents detailed technical documentation of the authors' ten-year archaeological excavation of La Isabela, America's first colony. The artifacts and material remains of the town offer rich ... More

This book presents detailed technical documentation of the authors' ten-year archaeological excavation of La Isabela, America's first colony. The artifacts and material remains of the town offer rich material for comparative research into Euro-American cultural and material development during the crucial transition from the medieval era to the Renaissance. The period when La Isabela was in existence witnessed great innovation and change in many areas of technology. The archaeological evidence of La Isabela's architecture, weaponry, numismatics, pottery, and metallurgy can be precisely dated, helping to chart the sequence of this change and revealing much that is new about late medieval technology. The authors' archaeological research also provides a foundation for their insights into the reasons for the demise of La Isabela.Less

Archipelago of Justice: Law in France's Early Modern Empire

Laurie M Wood

An examination of France’s Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires through the stories of the little known people who built it. This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of ... More

An examination of France’s Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires through the stories of the little known people who built it. This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of the people, such as itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire between 1680 and 1780 in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These imperial subjects sought new political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, particularly regarding slavery, war, and trade. Laurie M. Wood focuses largely on appellate courts in Martinique and Île de France (now Mauritius) and shows how the courts appealed to French citizens owing to their strategic place at the center of the largest and most dynamic oceanic zones of trade during the early modern era. Through court records and legal documents, she reveals how the courts became liaisons between France and its new colonial possessions, and how subjects used the courtrooms as gateways to other courtrooms in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and in France.Less

Aristocratic Vice: The Attack on Duelling, Suicide, Adultery, and Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England

Donna T. Andrew

This book examines the outrage against—and attempts to end—the four vices associated with the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England: dueling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. It also discusses ... More

This book examines the outrage against—and attempts to end—the four vices associated with the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England: dueling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. It also discusses how it was commonly believed that all four owed their origin to pride. Many felt the law did not go far enough to punish perpetrators when they were members of the elite. The book explores each vice's treatment by the press at the time and shows how a century of public attacks on aristocratic vices promoted a sense of “class superiority” among the soon-to-emerge British middle class.Less

Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age

Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan (eds)

Arming slaves as soldiers is a counterintuitive idea. Yet throughout history, in many varied societies, slaveholders have entrusted slaves with the use of deadly force. This book surveys the practice ... More

Arming slaves as soldiers is a counterintuitive idea. Yet throughout history, in many varied societies, slaveholders have entrusted slaves with the use of deadly force. This book surveys the practice broadly across space and time, encompassing the cultures of classical Greece, the early Islamic kingdoms of the Near East, West and East Africa, the British and French Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America. To facilitate cross-cultural comparisons, each chapter addresses four crucial issues: the social and cultural facts regarding the arming of slaves, the experience of slave soldiers, the ideological origins and consequences of equipping enslaved peoples for battle, and the impact of the practice on the status of slaves and slavery itself.Less

The Art of Peacemaking: Political Essays by István Bibó

István Bibó

Iván Z. Dénes (ed.)

István Bibó (1911–1979) was a Hungarian lawyer, political thinker, prolific essayist, and minister of state for the Hungarian national government during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This ... More

István Bibó (1911–1979) was a Hungarian lawyer, political thinker, prolific essayist, and minister of state for the Hungarian national government during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This magisterial compendium of Bibó's work introduces the writings of one of the foremost theorists and psychologists of twentieth-century European politics and culture. The chapters in this volume address the causes and fallout of European political crises, postwar changes in the balance of power among countries, and nation-building processes.Less

The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953

James Heinzen

Traditions of official corruption inherited from the Soviet and late Imperial eras have continued to touch Russian life since the collapse of the USSR. This study is the first archive-based, ... More

Traditions of official corruption inherited from the Soviet and late Imperial eras have continued to touch Russian life since the collapse of the USSR. This study is the first archive-based, historical study of bribery and corruption in the Soviet Union for this period. A study of the solicitation and offering of bribes forms the heart of this research. Bribery (vziatochnichestvo)—typically defined in law as gifts in cash or in kind intended to influence public officials to the benefit of the giver—represents the paradigmatic variety of corruption. This study takes a novel approach to the phenomenon of the bribe, examining it as an integral part of an unofficial yet essential series of relationships upon which much of Soviet society and state administration relied in order to function, as it gradually became part of the fabric of everyday life. The book examines three major, related themes. The book’s first theme, “The Landscape of Bribery,” concerns the nature and varieties of bribery, while painting a sociological portrait of the people involved. Whom did prosecutors accuse of such crimes? The second major topic addresses the regime’s attempts to understand the causes of bribery, and then to wipe it out through centrally directed anti-corruption “campaigns.” “The view from below,” which examines popular perceptions and understandings of bribery, constitutes the third dimension of the study. Focusing on bribery among police, court, and other law enforcement employees, this phase explores the imprecise and shifting line that separated “acceptable” from “unacceptable” behavior.Less

Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France

Paola Bertucci

What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? ... More

What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, this book places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment. At a time of great colonial, commercial, and imperial concerns, artistes planned encyclopedic projects and sought an official role in the administration of the French state. The Société des Arts, which they envisioned as a state institution that would foster France's colonial and economic expansion, was the most ambitious expression of their collective aspirations. This book provides the first in-depth study of the Société, and demonstrates its legacy in scientific programs, academies, and the making of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie. Through insightful analysis of textual, visual, and material sources, the book provides a ground-breaking perspective on the politics of writing on the mechanical arts and the development of key Enlightenment concepts such as improvement, utility, and progress.Less

Ascending India and Its State Capacity: Extraction, Violence, and Legitimacy

Sumit Ganguly and William R. Thompson

This book offers an account of the ongoing struggles and instability of India's political and economic institutions. India's ascent as a formidable power on the world stage and its geopolitical ... More

This book offers an account of the ongoing struggles and instability of India's political and economic institutions. India's ascent as a formidable power on the world stage and its geopolitical ramifications have received much attention in recent years. The text delves into the intricate inner workings of this great Asian nation to reveal an Indian state struggling to maintain national security, domestic order, and steady fiscal growth despite weaknesses in its economic and political institutions. The sobering account questions India's perceived strengths and domestic and foreign policy initiatives, while focusing on the South Asian giant's infrastructural and economic growth problems, opposition to reform, and other important hurdles the nation has faced and will continue to face over the coming decade and beyond.Less