Explore the vast range of titles available.

Historians have focused almost entirely on the attempt by southern African Americans to attain equal rights during Reconstruction. However, the northern states also witnessed a significant period of struggle during these years. Northern blacks vigorously protested laws establishing inequality in education, public accommodations, and political life and challenged the Republican Party to live up to its stated ideals. In\"We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less\", Hugh Davis concentrates on the two issues that African Americans in the North considered most essential: black male suffrage rights and equal access to the public schools. Davis connects the local and the national; he joins the specifics of campaigns in places such as Cincinnati, Detroit, and San Francisco with the work of the National Equal Rights League and its successor, the National Executive Committee of Colored Persons. The narrative moves forward from their launching of the equal rights movement in 1864 to the \"end\" of Reconstruction in the North two decades later. The struggle to gain male suffrage rights was the centerpiece of the movement's agenda in the 1860s, while the school issue remained a major objective throughout the period. Following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, northern blacks devoted considerable attention to assessing their place within the Republican Party and determining how they could most effectively employ the franchise to protect the rights of all citizens.

In The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir's Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era , Jack Beermann tells the story of how, in Hall v. Decuir , the postâ€\"Civil War US Supreme Court took its first step toward perpetuating the subjugation of the non-White population of the United States by actively preventing a Southern state from prohibiting segregation on a riverboat in the coasting trade on the Mississippi River. The Journey to Separate but Equal offers the first complete exploration of Hall v. Decuir , with an in-depth look at the case's record; the lives of the parties, lawyers, and judges; and the case's social context in 1870s Louisiana. The book centers around the remarkable story of Madame Josephine Decuir and the lawsuit she pursued because she had been illegally barred from the cabin reserved for White women on the Governor Allen riverboat. The drama of Madame Decuir's fight against segregation's denial of her dignity as a human and particularly as a woman enriches our understanding of the Reconstruction era, especially in Louisiana, including political and legal changes that occurred during that time and the plight of people of color who were freed from slavery but denied their dignity and rights as American citizens. Hall v. Decuir spanned the pivotal period of 1872-1878, during which White segregationist Democrats \"redeemed\" the South from Republican control. The Supreme Court's ruling in Hall overturned the application of an 1869 Louisiana statute prohibiting racial segregation in Madame Decuir’s case because of the status of the Mississippi River as a mode of interstate commerce. The decision represents a crucial precedent that established the legal groundwork for the entrenchment of Jim Crow in the law of the United States, leading directly to the Court’s adoption of “separate but equal†in Plessy v. Ferguson.

This book examines the relationship between antislavery texts and emerging representations of 'free labour' in mid-nineteenth-century America.

In the course of her research into five generations of the transatlantic family set in motion when enslavers brought a woman they would name Rosalie from Senegambia to Saint-Domingue in the 1780s, the historian Rebecca Scott encountered the term \"public rights\" uttered by one of Rosalie's descendants, Edouard Tinchant, on the floor of Louisiana's state Constitutional Convention after the Civil War. Listed alongside \"civil\" and \"political\" rights, \"public rights\" appeared fleetingly in the Louisiana state Constitution of 1868 and in statutes passed soon thereafter. Opponents of racial equality dismissed the term as a malapropism invented by activists who lacked formal legal training. Conservative lawyers with their eyes on the United States Supreme Court took action against the assertion of equal access to public accommodations. The moment of hopeful possibility of the late 1860s and early 1870s in the US South soon gave way to legally established segregation and white supremacy. The guarantees of both equal access and dignity that the concept encompassed vanished from Louisiana's new constitution in 1879, from the jurisprudence on equal rights, and effectively from the historical record. Scott's research calls on us to recover this term, and to take seriously activists' and legislators' intentional use of it. She implicitly asks us rigorously to historicize its usage in nineteenth-century New Orleans, a transatlantic hub where the French imperial and US postcolonial legal regimes met. In so doing, she pushes us to think about a radical road not taken in the Reconstruction-era South, and to reconsider what we know about the long struggle against white supremacy in the United States.

Since its enactment and ratification, savvy observers have viewed the Fourteenth Amendment as a vindication of the military experience of the Civil War. Bullets and bayonets in wartime led to peacetime citizenship in Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment and to peacetime ballots that were first protected in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment and then bolstered in the Fifteenth Amendment. But there is another story to tell as well, one in which the Fourteenth Amendment is not the beginning of a new constitutional story, or at least not only the beginning of a new story, but also a betrayal and an ending. In important respects the Fourteenth Amendment helped to close out the righteous form of power that had emerged in the antebellum era as a solution to the glaring injustice of slavery. This crucial authority was the federal government's war power. Stories of vindication and of new beginnings are not wrong. But they make it all too easy to miss the Fourteenth Amendment's role as part of a complicated denouement of the wartime experience, one that embodied the war's triumphs but also blunted their force and pace. The Fourteenth Amendment abandoned a vital chapter of American history even as it occasioned a new one whose results are still unfolding.

In 1954, American women experienced an unwanted pregnancy as presenting a difficult choice between bearing an unwanted child and risking an illegal abortion. Yet obstetrician/gynecologist Alan Guttmacher described abortion as “the doctor’s dilemma.” Guttmacher and his medical colleagues experienced a dilemma when their professional judgment that pregnancy termination was warranted clashed with the laws criminalizing most abortions. In that situation, the law constrained their ability to make a decision they felt to be in the best interest of a patient. To doctors, such paternalist decision-making was a bedrock principle of 20th-century medicine. Doctors had an obligation to provide, or deny, treatment to patients for their own good. This duty arose from medical expertise and separated the medical profession from lesser medical practitioners.

Historians working in the classical liberal tradition believe that individual decision-making and individual rights matter in the making of history. History written in the classical liberal tradition emerged largely in the nineteenth century, when the field of history was first professionalized in Europe and the Americas. Professional historical research was then imbued with liberal values, which included rigorous attention to the sources, historicist suspicion of an ultimate mover, an honest and dispassionate rational outlook, and humility towards what could be known. Above all, liberals wanted to chart the history of liberty, warn against threats to liberty, and defend it in an evolving political world. They believed history was real, and that it had lessons to teach, but that these lessons could not provide sufficient knowledge to predict the future or reorganize society around a central plan. This book demonstrates how the classical liberal tradition in historical writing persists to this day, but how it is often neglected and due for renewal. The book contrasts the classical liberal view on history with conservative, progressive, Marxist, and post-modern views. Each of the eleven chapters address a different historical topic, from the development of classical liberalism in nineteenth century America to the the history of civil liberties and civil rights that stemmed from this tradition. Authors give particular attention to the importance of social and economic analysis. Each contributor was chosen as an expert in their field to provide a historiographical overview of their subject, and to explain what the classical liberal contribution to this historiography has been and should be. Authors then provide guidance towards possible tools of analysis and related research topics that future historians working in the classical liberal tradition could take up. The authors wish to call upon other historians to recognize the important contributions to historical understanding that have come and can be provided by the insights of classical liberalism.

In this case study, Professor Siegel analyzes the modernization of marital status law, examining the regulation of domestic violence as it evolved from a law of marital prerogative into a law of marital privacy. Modernization of a status regime occurs when a legal system enforces social stratification by means that change over time. During the nineteenth century, courts repudiated a husband's prerogative to inflict corporal punishment on his wife, yet began to grant men accused of wife beating a variety of formal and informal immunities from prosecution, in order to promote domestic harmony and preserve family privacy. Professor Siegel demonstrates how evolving social mores and woman's rights agitation prompted the modernization of this body of status law, transforming a legal prerogative justified in tropes of hierarchy into a legal immunity justified in tropes of interiority. Civil rights reform plays a key role in the modernization of racial and gender status law. As civil rights agitation draws the legitimacy of a status regime into question, legal elites will both cede and defend privileges, continuing to reform the rules and justificatory rhetoric of the regime, until the contested body of status law can once again be defended as reasonable. This dynamic of \"preservation through transformation\" translates a discredited status regime into a more contemporary, and less controversial, social idiom. Thus, civil rights reform may improve the welfare of subordinated groups, but it also enhances the capacity of the legal system to justify the manner in which it distributes material and dignitary privileges among social groups. A final section employs this account of modernization to analyze equal protection doctrine and the Violence Against Women Act, suggesting that civil rights reform is continuing to modernize the rules and rhetoric of racial and gender status law.

The campaign to overturn Roe v Wade continues the legal oppression of women through abortion laws which began in the 19th century. Modern arguments about fetal protection have replaced 19th-century arguments about women's roles, but the same attitudes to women underlie both. Viewed from the constitutional perspective of equal protection, antiabortion laws violate the principles of antidiscrimination and antisubordination.