Making Legal History : : Essays in Honor of William E. Nelson / / ed. by R. B. Bernstein, Daniel J. Hulsebosch.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• MitwirkendeR: Barringer Gordon, Sarah,; Blumenthal, Susanna L.,; Brown-Nagin, Tomiko,; Cushman, Barry,; Dayton, Cornelia H.,; Hamilton, Daniel W.,; Horwitz, Morton J.,; Mackey, Thomas C.,; Salinger, Sharon V.,; Schiller, Reuel,; Wertheimer, John,; Witt, John Fabian,
• HerausgeberIn: Bernstein, R. B.,; Hulsebosch, Daniel J.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2013]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

One of the academy’s leading legal historians, William E. Nelson is the Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. For more than four decades, Nelson has produced some of the most original and creative work on American constitutional and legal history. His prize-winning books have blazed new trails for historians with their substantive arguments and the scope and depth of Nelson’s exploration of primary sources. Nelson was the first legal scholar to use early American county court records as sources of legal and social history, and his work (on legal history in England, colonial America, and New York) has been a model for generations of legal historians. This book collects ten essays exemplifying and explaining the process of identifying and interpreting archival sources-the foundation of an array of methods of writing American legal history. The essays presented here span the full range of American history from the colonial era to the 1980s.Each historian has either identified a body of sources not previously explored or devised a new method of interrogating sources already known.The result is a kaleidoscopic examination of the historian’s task and of the research methods and interpretative strategies that characterize the rich, complex field of American constitutional and legal history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- I. Civil Wars and Legal Rights -- 1. The Landscape of Faith -- 2. “It cant be cald stealin’” -- 3. Debating the Fourteenth Amendment -- II. Law and Social Regulation -- 4. Was the Warning of Strangers Unique to Colonial New England? -- 5. Ambiguities of Free Labor Revisited -- 6. The Long, Broad, and Deep Civil Rights Movement -- 7. Counting as a Tool of Legal History -- III. Courts, Judges, and Litigators -- 8. A Mania for Accumulation -- 9. The Political Economy of Pain -- 10. An Unexpected Antagonist -- Bibliography of the Scholarship of William E. Nelson, 1963–2012 -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Index