The Supreme Court: An Essential History

The Supreme Court: An Essential History Review

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The Supreme Court: An Essential History Feature

For more than two centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court has provided a battleground for nearly every controversial issue in our nation's history. Now a veteran team of talented historians-including the editors of the acclaimed Landmark Law Cases and American Society series--have produced the most readable, astute, and up-to-date single-volume history of this venerated institution, as engaging for general readers as it is rigorous for scholars.

The Supreme Court chronicles an institution that dramatically evolved from six men meeting in borrowed quarters to the most closely watched tribunal in the world. Underscoring the close connection between law and politics, the authors highlight essential issues, cases, and decisions within the context of the times in which the decisions were handed down. Deftly combining doctrine and judicial biography with case law, they demonstrate how the justices have shaped the law and how the law that the Court makes has shaped our nation, with an emphasis on how the Court responded--or failed to respond--to the plight of the underdog.

Each chapter covers the Court's years under a specific Chief Justice, focusing on cases that are the most reflective of the way the Court saw the law and the world and that had the most impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. Throughout the authors reveal how--in times of war, class strife, or moral revolution--the Court sometimes voiced the conscience of the nation and sometimes seemed to lose its moral compass. Their extensive quotes from the Court's opinions and dissents illuminate its inner workings, as well as the personalities and beliefs of the justices and the often-contentious relationships among them.

Fair-minded and sharply insightful, The Supreme Court portrays an institution defined by eloquent and pedestrian decisions and by justices ranging from brilliant and wise to slow-witted and expedient. An epic and essential story, it illuminates the Court's role in our lives and its place in our history.

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A History of the Birth Control Movement in America (Healing Society: Disease, Medicine, and History)

A History of the Birth Control Movement in America (Healing Society: Disease, Medicine, and History) Review

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A History of the Birth Control Movement in America (Healing Society: Disease, Medicine, and History) Feature

A History of the Birth Control Movement in America tells the extraordinary story of a group of reformers dedicated to making contraception legal, accessible, and acceptable. The engrossing tale details how Margaret Sanger's campaign beginning in 1914 to challenge anti-obscenity laws criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information grew into one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history.

The book opens with a discussion of the history of birth control methods and the criminalization of contraception and abortion in the 19th century. Its core, however, is an exciting narrative of the campaign in the 20th century, vividly recalling the arrests and indictments, banned publications, imprisonments, confiscations, clinic raids, mass meetings, and courtroom dramas that publicized the cause across the nation. Attention is paid to the movement's thorny alliances with medicine and eugenics and especially to its success in precipitating a profound shift in sexual attitudes that turned the use of contraception into an acceptable social and medical practice. Finally, the birth control movement is linked to court-won privacy protections and the present-day movement for reproductive rights.

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Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment

Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment Review

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Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment Feature

The criminal justice system in America is as powerful a shaper of history and society as its better-known counterparts--the military, politics, government, and technology. In a country that lacks a mandatory death sentence for specific crimes, the American strategy for execution proves to be based more upon distinctions between offenders than upon distinctions between offenses.

Five important novels--McTeague, An American Tragedy, Native Son, In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song--bring readers a vivid awareness of America's punitive codes. Each details the story of a life that leads to the gallows. Sentenced to Death places these works against the historical background of crime and capital punishment in America, a nation where public discourse on crime is dominated by images of the electric chair and the gas chamber, by maximum security prisons, by hardened convicts out on parole. Such images, in turn mirror and shape the exercise of punitive power.

This probing look at capital punishment in execution novels and in real-life media accents the poles of punitive power. Such a comparison of literary works with confrontational journalism and court records also brings revealing insight into the long-term debate on capital punishment in American culture.

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Laying a Creation Foundation: Building Blocks in Science

Laying a Creation Foundation: Building Blocks in Science Review

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Laying a Creation Foundation: Building Blocks in Science Feature

In this first volume, former evolutionary biologist Gary Parker looks at life sciences, digging into physical structures from early man to fossils. Parker discusses DNA, the artistic skills of Neanderthal Man, and much more in this illustrated study. Parker uses his formidable and popular teaching skills to focus on, for example, the chemical reaction betweens acids and bases, then zooms back out for the big-picture, scriptural evidence that God created all. By integrating his thorough knowledge of how the human body works with man's natural surroundings, Parker presents both a physiological and philosophical picture of our purposes on this planet. ALSO INCLUDED: Helpful study questions, discussion topics, and more.

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Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago

Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago Review

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Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago Feature

Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago

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Resist Not Evil

Resist Not Evil Review

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Resist Not Evil Feature

This remarkable book is the most comprehensive, sweeping, compelling, and unsettling case ever penned against what is laughingly called the criminal-justice system. It is a classic, devastating at its core, that is made newly available to speak to us in our times in which the state is completely out of control.

Clarence Darrow is best known today as the Chicago lawyer who defended John T. Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. But that case actually played a minor role in his life. He was an attorney by training who, from experience, learned that the entire state apparatus of courts, trials, and prisons was the worse single feature of the state. He saw the entire machinery has a gigantic fraud, a purveyor of injustice, a producer of criminality itself.

How so? Because, in the same way that the state cannot plan the economy, "the state furnishes no machinery for arriving at justice." He proves the point. It taxes people more rather than brings about compensation. It kills rather than rights wrongs. It ruins lives instead of righting them. It cares nothing about victims and instead makes more of them. Darrow even argues that the state attempts to create more criminals rather than stopping crime.

For this reason, and after seeing these truths play themselves out in his work, he became a radical, and Resist Not Evil is his manifesto. What strikes you as you read is that certain negative points about "criminal justice" that you have noticed are not just periodic accidents. They aren't mistakes. They aren't exceptions. Darrow explains that the injustice of the system is intrinsic to the system itself. Far from being the proper agency to adjudicate and administe

Fair warning: this book is extremely unsettling. It will shake you fundamentally. You will never look at judges, police, courts, and jails the same way. It could change your whole outlook on politics - permanently.

Doug French writes the introduction.

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Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial

Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial Review

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Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial Feature

In 1931, nine black youths were charged with raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama. Despite meager and contradictory evidence, all nine were found guilty and eight of the defendants were sentenced to death--making Scottsboro one of the worst travesties of justice to take place in the post-Reconstruction South. Remembering Scottsboro explores how this case has embedded itself into the fabric of American memory and become a lens for perceptions of race, class, sexual politics, and justice. James Miller draws upon the archives of the Communist International and NAACP, contemporary journalistic accounts, as well as poetry, drama, fiction, and film, to document the impact of Scottsboro on American culture.

The book reveals how the Communist Party, NAACP, and media shaped early images of Scottsboro; looks at how the case influenced authors including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Harper Lee; shows how politicians and Hollywood filmmakers invoked the case in the ensuing decades; and examines the defiant, sensitive, and savvy correspondence of Haywood Patterson--one of the accused, who fled the Alabama justice system. Miller considers how Scottsboro persists as a point of reference in contemporary American life and suggests that the Civil Rights movement begins much earlier than the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955.

Remembering Scottsboro demonstrates how one compelling, provocative, and tragic case still haunts the American racial imagination.

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Dead Lee's Guide To Haunted Chicago

Dead Lee's Guide To Haunted Chicago Review

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Dead Lee's Guide To Haunted Chicago Feature

This version of Haunted Chicago contains all of my previously released material as well as dozens of new stories. Each one has been lovingly rewritten and updated to contain tons of brand new material. Don't worry, this version still contains your favorite tale

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But Didn't We Have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870

But Didn't We Have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870 Review

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But Didn't We Have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870 Feature

The story of baseball in America begins not with the fabled Abner Doubleday but with a generation of mid-nineteenth-century Americans who moved from the countryside to the cities and brought a cherished but delightfully informal game with them. But Didn't We Have Fun? will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about baseball's origins. Peter Morris, author of the prizewinning A Game of Inches, takes a fresh look at the early amateur years of the game. Mr. Morris retrieves a lost era and a lost way of life. Offering a challenging new perspective on baseball's earliest years, and conveying the sense of delight that once pervaded the game and its players, Mr. Morris supplants old myths with a story just as marvelous-but one that really happened. With 25 rare photographs and drawings.

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When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah's Flood

When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah's Flood Review

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When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah's Flood Feature

The story of Noah's flood is one of the best-loved and most often retold biblical tales, the inspiration for numerous children's books and toys, novels, and even films. Whether as allusion, archetype, or literal presence--the American landscape is peppered with "recreations" of the ark--the story of Noah's animals and the ark resonates throughout American culture and the world.

While most think of Noah's ark as a dramatic myth, others are consumed by the quest for geological and archeological proof that the flood really occurred. Persistent rumors of a large vessel on the mountain of Ararat in Turkey, for instance, have led many pilgrims and explorers over the centuries to visit that fabled peak. Recent finds suggest that there may have been a catastrophic flood on the shores of the Black Sea some 7,600 years ago. Is this then the reality behind the ancient tale of Noah? More to the point, why does it matter?

What does the story of the Flood mean to us and why does it so stir the collective imagination? When the Great Abyss Opened examines the history of our attempts to understand the Flood, from medieval Jewish and Christian speculation about the physical details of the ark to contemporary efforts to link it to scientific findings. Unraveling the mythical dimensions of the parallel Mesopotamian flood stories and their deeper social and psychological significance, J. David Pleins also considers the story's positive uses in theology and moral instruction. Noah's tale, however, has also been invoked as a means of justifying exclusion, racism, and anti-homosexual views. Pro-slavery advocates, for example, used the story of Noah's Curse on Ham's son Canaan to rationalize the enslavement of Africans.

Throughout this expansive and lively book, Pleins sheds new light on our continuing attempts to understand this ancient primal myth. Noah's Flood, he contends, offers a unique case study that illuminates the timeless and timely question of how fact and faith relate.

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