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James Wilson’s life began as an Atlantic World success story, with mounting intellectual, political, and legal triumphs, but ended as a Greek tragedy. Each achievement brought greater anxiety about his place in the revolutionary world. James Wilson's life story is a testament to the success that tens of thousands of Scottish immigrants achieved after their trans-Atlantic voyage, but it also reminds us that not all had a happy ending. This book provides a more nuanced and complete picture of James Wilson’s contributions in American history. His contributions were far greater than just the attention paid to his legal lectures. His is a very human story of a Scottish immigrant who experienced success and acclaim for his activities on behalf of the American people during his public service, but in his personal affairs, and particularly financial life, he suffered the great heights and deep lows worthy of a Greek tragedy. James Wilson's life is an entry point into the events of the latter half of the 18th century and the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on American society, discourse, and government.
"This volume, a collection of letters written by an abolitionist businessman who lived in East Tennessee prior to the Civil War, provides one of the clearest firsthand views yet published of a region whose political, social, and economic distinctions have intrigued historians for more than a century." "Between 1841 and 1846, Birdseye expressed his views and observations in letters to Gerrit Smith, a prominent New York reformer who arranged to have many of them published in antislavery newspapers such as the Emancipator and Friend of Man." "Those letters, reproduced in this book, drew on Birdseye's extensive conversations with slaveholders, nonslaveholders, and the slaves themselves. He found that East Tennesseans, on the whole, were antislavery in sentiment, susceptible to rational abolitionist appeal, and generally far more lenient toward individual slaves than were other southerners. Opposed to slavery on economic as well as moral grounds, Birdseye sought to establish a free labor colony in East Tennessee in the early 1840s and actively supported the region's abortive effort in 1842 to separate itself from the rest of the state."--[book jacket].
Ranging from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the stories of five patriots and critics. In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape the directions of legal change.
“One of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years” (The Wall Street Journal) and based on a decade of research and reporting—a delightful new window into the public and private lives America’s presidents as authors. Most Americans are familiar with Abraham Lincoln’s famous words in the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet few can name the work that helped him win the presidency: his published collection of speeches entitled Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln labored in secret to get his book ready for the 1860 election, tracking down newspaper transcripts, editing them carefully for fa...
This ebook issue of the Harvard Law Review is May 2011. Contents of Volume 124, Number 7 include: Article, "Article III and the Scottish Judiciary," by James E. Pfander and Daniel D. Birk Book Review, "Constitutional Alarmism," by Trevor W. Morrison Note, "A Justification for Allowing Fragmentation in Copyright" Note, "Taxing Partnership Profits Interests: The Carried Interest Problem" Recent Case, "Corporate Law — Principal’s Liability for Agent’s Conduct" Recent Case, "Administrative Law — Retroactive Rules" Recent Case, "Federal Preemption of State Law — Implied Preemption" Recent Case, "Labor Law — LMRA" Recent Legislation, "Corporate Law — Securities Regulation" Recent Publications
Today, interest in monetary history has been revived. Economists are examing the "structure" of money and banking: what is money and what are banks? With new technologies, overwhelming market forces, and changes in law and regulation, the answers that had been taken for granted have been revealed to be inadequate. Money and Banking spans the period from the founding of the country to the present. The unifying theme is the consideration of the legal and economic underpinnings of money and banking during the several monetary regimes found in the history of the United States. Contributors: Clifford F. Thies, Kevin Dowd, Richard H. Timberlake, J. Huston McCulloch, Gregory B. Christainsen, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Eugene N. White, James A. Dorn, Gary M. Pecquet, Tyler Cowen, George A. Selgin and Lawrence H. White, Richard Sylla, Robert L. Greenfield and Hugh Rockoff, Joesph T. Salerno, Anna J. Schwartz, Charles W. Calomiris, Ronald W. Batchelder and David Glasner, Michael D. Bordo, Mark Toma, Larry Schweikart, Dwight R. Lee.
A highly readable, beautifully illustrated study of the homes built by elite colonial Philadelphians as retreats—which balanced English models with developing local taste. Colonial Americans, if they could afford it, liked to emulate the fashions of London and the style and manners of English country society while at the same time thinking of themselves as distinctly American. The houses they built reflected this ongoing cultural tension. By the mid-eighteenth century, Americans had developed their own version of the bourgeois English countryseat, a class of estate equally distinct in social function and form from townhouses, rural plantations, and farms. The metropolis of Philadelphia was...
Called "a pioneer work of the first importance" by Staughton Lynd, this book traces the history of pacifism in America from colonial times to the start of World War I. The author describes how the immigrant peace sects-Quaker, Mennonite, and Dunker -faced the challenges of a hostile environment. The peace societies that sprang up after 1815 form the subject of the next section, with particular attention focused upon the American Peace Society and Garrison's New England Non-Resistance Society. A series of chapters on the reactions of these sects and societies to the Civil War, the neglect of pacifism in the postwar period, and the beginnings of a renewal in the years before the outbreak of wa...