American Law

Following the Civil War, the Reconstruction era raised a new question to those in power in the US: Should African Americans, so many of them former slaves, be granted the right to vote? In this vivid portrait of the systematic suppression of the African-American vote, critically acclaimed author Lawrence Goldstone traces the injustices of the post-Reconstruction era through the eyes of incredible individuals, both heroic and barbaric, and examines the legal cases that made the Supreme Court a partner of white supremacists in the rise of Jim Crow.

It is 1942, and World War II is raging. In the months since Pearl Harbor, the US has plunged into the war overseas—and on the home front, it has locked up tens of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans in concentration camps, tearing them from their homes on the West Coast with the ostensible goal of neutralizing a supposed internal threat. At each of these camps the government places a white lawyer with contradictory instructions: provide legal counsel to the prisoners, and keep the place running.

Most Americans know Andrew Jackson as a frontier rebel against political and diplomatic norms, a "populist" champion of ordinary people against the elitist legacy of the Founding Fathers. Many date the onset of American democracy to his 1829 inauguration. Despite his reverence for the "sovereign people", however, Jackson spent much of his career limiting that sovereignty, imposing new and often unpopular legal regimes over American lands and markets.

In 1974, Pan American Flight 806 was hoping to land safely in Pago Pago, Samoa, but instead plummeted at 140 miles per hour into the jungle floor. The 101 passengers and crew members all survived this devastating crash. Unfortunately, only four of them escaped the wreckage before the ensuing fire that followed and lived to tell their story. After the disaster, Pan American was found guilty of "willful misconduct" after the longest and most expensive trial in aviation history.

Crimes and violations of the law require punishment, and our legal system is set up to punish, but what if the system was recalibrated to also weigh grounds for forgiveness? What if something like bankruptcy - a fresh start for debtors - were available to people convicted of crimes? Martha Minow explores the complicated intersection of the law, justice, and forgiveness, asking whether the law should encourage people to forgive, and when courts, public officials, and specific laws should forgive.

In 1805 and 1806, Aaron Burr, former vice president of the newly formed American republic, traveled through the Trans-Appalachian West gathering support for a mysterious enterprise, for which he was arrested and tried for treason in 1807. This book explores the political and cultural forces that shaped how Americans made sense of the uncertain rumors and reports about Burr's intentions and movements, and examines what the resulting crisis reveals about their anxieties concerning the new nation's fragile union and uncertain republic.

From the late 19th century through the 1930s, scholars of politics defined and continually reoriented their field in response to the political imperatives of the racial order at home and abroad as well to as the vagaries of race science. The Gilded Age scholars who founded the first university departments and journals located sovereignty and legitimacy in a "Teutonic germ" of liberty planted in the new world by Anglo-Saxon settlers and almost extinguished in the conflict over slavery.

On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be “colored”; the school was for whites. This event would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools, an astonishing thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.Brown v. Board of Education decision.

The creation of the Texas Rangers, as a response to Indian retaliations and renegade assaults on the banking and transportation systems, was born of a need to react quickly. Special skills were required, and unlike the military, resourcefulness and improvisatory thinking were prized, alongside obedience to orders. Author Mike Cox described the ideal Texas Ranger as one who is "able to handle any situation without definite instruction from his commanding officer."

Widely known as the "poor man's lawyer" in antebellum Boston, John Albion Andrew (1818-1867) was involved in nearly every cause and case that advanced social and racial justice in Boston in the years preceding the Civil War. Inspired by the legacies of John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and mentored by Charles Sumner, Andrew devoted himself to the battle for equality. In this revealing and accessible biography, Stephen D. Engle traces Andrew's life and legacy, giving this important, but largely forgotten, figure his due.

John Taliaferro Thompson had a mission: to develop a lightweight, fast-firing weapon that would help Americans win on the battlefield. His Thompson submachine gun could deliver 100 bullets in a matter of seconds - but didn't find a market in the US military. Instead, the Tommy gun became the weapon of choice for a generation of bootleggers and bank-robbing outlaws, and became a deadly American icon. Following a bloody decade - and 80 years before the mass shootings of our own time - Congress moved to take this weapon off the streets, igniting a national debate about gun control.

Progressives who opposed the Trump administration's policies found themselves repeatedly relying on constitutional principles grounded in federalism, separation of powers, and free speech to resist the federal government. Although many progressives had either criticized or underemphasized those principles before Trump, the principles became vital to progressive causes after Trump was elected.

Could slavery get worse after centuries of it? It did in the slave South in the decades just before the Civil War. This book explores the expansion of slavery during the period, the growth of the mass-labor cotton and sugar plantations, the expulsion of the Native Americans, and the new types of repression.

Even after the institution of slavery became illegal, the legacy of slavery continued through injustices created by the Jim Crow laws. Learn more about these discriminatory laws that have shaped America's past and present. Inspired by a belief that knowledge is power, Read Woke Books seek to amplify the voices of people who are not white, provide information about groups that have been disenfranchised, share perspectives of people who have been underrepresented or oppressed, challenge social norms and disrupt the status quo, and encourage readers to take action in their community.

Nosotros, el pueblo de Who HQ, traemos a los lectores la historia completa (argumentos y todo) de cómo surgió la Constitución de los Estados Unidos.

Thurgood Marshall, the African-American lawyer who successfully argued the Brown v. Board case. Today, Marshall is best known for being the first Black Supreme Court justice, but that history-setting precedent has come to overshadow the instrumental work he did as chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Marshall argued more cases before the Supreme Court than anyone in history and would win nearly 30 of them, including the seminal Brown v. Board case.

This work looks at life in the United States in contemporary times and at some of the things immigrants and other foreigners need to know to be able to fit in the American society. Subjects covered include a comprehensive picture of the United States as a country and as a nation; American culture; some of the problems and challenges immigrants and other foreigners face when they are in the United States; profiles of immigrants and other foreigners from different parts of the world and how they see the United States, and much more.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice.

When the death of Isaiah “Zay” Turner awakens controversy in the Midwest, Jennifer Davis and attorney Marcus Brown band together to bring the Turner family their deserved justice. They work closely as a team to conquer allyship, defeat agenda-setting narratives, and decriminalize Isaiah’s name--alongside his mother, uncle, and girlfriend Tiara.

"Tax Free at Last" is a true story about income tax law, tracing its roots over 100 years ago from a simple tax collection method to an uncontrollable force that impacts all citizens' lives. The book sheds light on unexplored corners of the income tax world and advocates for a complete overhaul of the tax system.