Portland Public Library

Law in American history, G. Edward White

eng

Includes bibliographical references and indexes

index present

non fiction

Law in American history

bibliography

719714853

G. Edward White

Volume 1: In the first of the three volumes of his projected comprehensive narrative history of the role of law in America from the colonial years through the twentieth century, G. Edward White takes up the central themes of American legal history from the earliest European settlements through the Civil War. Included in the coverage of this volume are the interactions between European and Amerindian legal systems in the years of colonial settlement; the crucial role of Anglo-American theories of sovereignty and imperial governance in facilitating the separation of the American colonies from the British Empire in the late eighteenth century; the American "experiment" with federated republican constitutionalism in the founding period; the major importance of agricultural householding, in the form of slave plantations as well as farms featuring wage labor, in helping to shape the development of American law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the emergence of the Supreme Court of the United States as an authoritative force in American law and politics in the early nineteenth century; the interactions between law, westward expansion, and transformative developments in transportation and communication in the antebellum years; the contributions of American legal institutions to the dissolution of the Union of American states in the three decades after 1830; and the often-overlooked legal history of the Confederacy and Union governments during the Civil War. White incorporates recent scholarship in anthropology, ethnography, and economic, political, intellectual and legal history to produce a narrative that is both revisionist and accessible, taking up the familiar topics of race, gender, slavery, and the treatment of native Americans from fresh perspectivesVolume 2: In this second installment of G. Edward White's sweeping history of law in America from the colonial era to the present, White, covers the period between 1865-1929, which encompasses Reconstruction, rapid industrialization, a huge influx of immigrants, the rise of Jim Crow, the emergence of an American territorial empire, World War I, and the booming yet xenophobic 1920s. As in the first volume, he connects the evolution of American law to the major political, economic, cultural, social, and demographic developments of the era. To enrich his account, White draws from the latest research from across the social sciences--economic history, anthropology, and sociology--yet weave those insights into a highly accessible narrativeVolume 3: In Law in American History, Volume III: 1930-2000, the eminent legal scholar G. Edward White concludes his sweeping history of law in America, from the colonial era to the near-present. Picking up where his previous volume left off, at the end of the 1920s, White turns his attention to modern developments in both public and private law. One of his findings is that despite the massive changes in American society since the New Deal, some of the landmark constitutional decisions from that period remain salient today. An illustration is the Court's sweeping interpretation of the reach of Congress's power under the Commerce Clause in Wickard v. Filburn (1942), a decision that figured prominently in the Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act. In these formative years of modern American jurisprudence, courts responded to, and affected, the emerging role of the state and federal governments as regulatory and redistributive institutions and the growing participation of the United States in world affairs. They extended their reach into domains they had mostly ignored: foreign policy, executive power, criminal procedure, and the rights of speech, sexuality, and voting. Today, the United States continues to grapple with changing legal issues in each of those domains. Law in American History, Volume III provides an authoritative introduction to how modern American jurisprudence emerged and evolved of the course of the twentieth century, and the impact of law on every major feature of American life in that century. White's two preceding volumes and this one constitute a definitive treatment of the role of law in American history., --From publisher's description