The Roots of Rough Justice

Author(s):  
Michael J. Pfeifer

This deeply researched prequel to the author's 2006 study Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947, analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers, this book offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era. The book examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. This is the first book to consider the crucial emergence of the practice of lynching slaves in antebellum America, and it also leads the way in analyzing the history of American lynching in a global context. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region, the book shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States.

2020 ◽  
Vol 247 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-112
Author(s):  
David Sim

Abstract This article tracks and analyses the history of bonds issued by the Fenian Brotherhood in the 1860s to argue that US Americans could take part in a marketplace in distant revolutions in the mid-nineteenth century. In this period, various, disparate nationalist groups issued bonds, suggesting a commonly understood method of generating funds, sustaining sentimental attachment, and projecting the authority of authentic nation-states. The Civil War-era United States was a particularly fertile environment for the issuance of such bonds because of its traditions of free banking, the ease with which bonds might be floated to a public increasingly au fait with their operation, and a broad rhetorical sympathy with the distant revolutions for which these bonds stood. The debt these bonds represented acted as a sentimental form of ‘special money’ and, for Irish-Americans, as for other immigrant communities in the United States, they allowed participation in a transnational movement without ever leaving their immediate neighbourhood. Tracing their issuance and circulation, then, allows us to write a material, sentimental and social history of everyday transnationalism and anti-imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. For later generations, this sentimental quality could and did devolve into a more immediately financial form, and the article concludes by identifying the redemption of these bonds as a significant step in legitimating the new Irish republic to a US audience.


1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. W. B. Brockliss

During the past ten years, historians of early modern Europe in Britain, France and the United States have shown an increasing interest in the history of education. Doubtless encouraged by the contemporary formulation of an educational sociology, they in turn have begun to investigate the form and function of education in pre-industrial societies. For the most part, however, research has been limited to the study of elementary education with the purpose of understanding the effect of its expansion on literacy and popular attitudes. Less attention has been paid to the social history of higher education, particularly to the role of the universities. The one exception is the case of Oxford and Cambridge for which studies abound through the efforts of Professor Stone and his pupils. But outside England, apart from Kagan's work on the Spanish universities, studies have been few and limited to accounts of patterns of attendance over relatively short periods of time that give little indication of the general picture. Indeed, information about the history of attendance at most universities in the early modern period has still to be gleaned from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studies – useful as sources of administrative history, but seldom revealing on questions that interest the present-day historian. Apparendy, too, there is little chance of the position improving in the future. With the exception of a project envisaged by the French early modernists, Chartier, Frijhoff and Julia, interest in the social history of universities seems to be diminishing.


Author(s):  
Fred I. Greenstein ◽  
Dale Anderson

The United States witnessed an unprecedented failure of its political system in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a disastrous civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 Americans. This book assesses the personal strengths and weaknesses of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. The book evaluates the leadership styles of the Civil War-era presidents. The book looks at the presidential qualities of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. For each president, the book provides a concise history of the man's life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. The book sheds light on why Buchanan is justly ranked as perhaps the worst president in the nation's history, how Pierce helped set the stage for the collapse of the Union and the bloodiest war America had ever experienced, and why Lincoln is still considered the consummate American leader to this day. The book reveals what enabled some of these presidents, like Lincoln and Polk, to meet the challenges of their times—and what caused others to fail.


Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.


1986 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 896-901 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Lachs

To write of Philip Jessup means to survey the history of the teaching of international law in the United States throughout the last half century; to cover all important events concerning the birth of international organizations on the morrow of the Second World War; to visit the halls of the General Assembly and the Security Council; to attend meetings of the American Society of International Law and the Institute of International Law, where he so frequently took the floor to shed light on their debates; to attend sittings of the International Court of Justice in the years 1960-1969. I could hardly undertake this task; there are others much more qualified to do so. What I wish to do is to recall him as a great jurist I knew and a delightful human being; in short, a judge and a great friend whom I learned to admire.


1970 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 267
Author(s):  
James C. Bonner ◽  
J. C. Furnas

Author(s):  
Craig Allen

The first completely researched history of U.S. Spanish-language television traces the rise of two foremost, if widely unrecognized, modern American enterprises—the Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo. It is a standard scholarly history constructed from archives, original interviews, reportage, and other public materials. Occasioned by the public’s wakening to a “Latinization” of the U.S., the book demonstrates that the emergence of Spanish-language television as a force in mass communication is essential to understanding the increasing role of Latinos and Latino affairs in modern American society. It argues that a combination of foreign and domestic entrepreneurs and innovators who overcame large odds resolves a significant and timely question: In an English-speaking country, how could a Spanish-speaking institution have emerged? Through exploration of significant and colorful pioneers, continuing conflicts and setbacks, landmark strides, and ongoing controversies—and with revelations that include regulatory indecision, behind-the-scenes tug-of-war, and the internationalization of U.S. mass media—the rise of a Spanish-language institution in the English-speaking U.S. is explained. Nine chapters that begin with Spanish-language television’s inception in 1961 and end 2012 chronologically narrate the endeavor’s first 50 years. Events, passages, and themes are thoroughly referenced.


Author(s):  
John B. Nann ◽  
Morris L. Cohen

This introductory chapter provides an overview of legal history research. An attorney might conduct legal history research if the law at question in a legal dispute is very old: the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights are well over two hundred years old. Historical research also comes into play when the question at issue is what the law was at a certain time in the past. Ultimately, law plays an important part in the political and social history of the United States. As such, researchers interested in almost every aspect of American life will have occasion to use legal materials. The chapter then describes the U.S. legal system and legal authority, and offers six points to consider in approaching a historical legal research project.


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