A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

A Nation of Rights

Laura F. Edwards (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

226 Seiten

2015
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-107-00879-3 (ISBN)

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Although hundreds of thousands of people died fighting in the American Civil War, perhaps the war's biggest casualty was the nation's legal order. A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction explores the implications of this major change by bringing legal history into dialogue with the scholarship of other historical fields. Federal policy on slavery and race, particularly the three Reconstruction amendments, are the best-known legal innovations of the era. Change, however, permeated all levels of the legal system, altering Americans' relationship to the law and allowing them to move popular conceptions of justice into the ambit of government policy. The results linked Americans to the nation through individual rights, which were extended to more people and, as a result of new claims, were reimagined to cover a wider array of issues. But rights had limits in what they could accomplish, particularly when it came to the collective goals that so many ordinary Americans advocated.

Laura F. Edwards is the Peabody Family Professor of History at Duke University, North Carolina. Her book The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South was awarded the American Historical Association's 2009 Littleton–Griswold Prize for the best book in law and society and the Southern Historical Association's Charles Sydnor Prize for the best book in Southern history.

Introduction; 1. The United States and its use of the people; 2. The Confederacy and its legal contradictions; 3. Enslaved Americans, emancipation, and the future legal order; 4. The federal government and the reconstruction of the legal order; 5. The possibilities of rights; 6. The power of law and the limits of rights; 7. Conclusion.

Reihe/Serie	New Histories of American Law
Verlagsort	Cambridge
Sprache	englisch
Maße	145 x 218 mm
Gewicht	370 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
	Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
	Recht / Steuern ► Rechtsgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-107-00879-4 / 1107008794
ISBN-13	978-1-107-00879-3 / 9781107008793
Zustand	Neuware