Sunday Book Roundup

The Nation reviews Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing and the Public Domain (Oxford Univ. Press) by Robert Spoo.

"Sometimes, in the absence of copyright, publishers have paid authors and have abstained from reprinting the books of authors they haven’t paid. Ulysses, by James Joyce, considered by some the greatest novel of the twentieth century, lost its copyright protection in America on a technicality soon after it was published. But from the 1930s to the ’90s, Joyce and his estate were paid royalties from its publication in America anyway, thanks to exactly this kind of happy anarchy. In his new scholarly book Without Copyrights, the legal and literary historian Robert Spoo tells the remarkable tale, which Spoo doesn’t necessarily deem a pretty one. Spoo rather sympathizes, in fact, with the character many observers would consider the villain."

Salon publishes an excerpt of Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (Knopf) by Denise A Spellberg, and NPR reviews Jill Lepore's book about a Founding Father's sister, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (Knopf).

H-Net adds several works this week, including one of Wolfgang Knobl and Hans Joas's War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present (Princeton University Press), another of Robert Cassanello's To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville (University Press of Florida) (audio interview in last week's post), a third of Nancy Kollmann's Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge), and a fourth of Judy Tzu-Chun Wu's Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Cornell University Press).

"As its title suggests, Radicals on the Road uses the transpacific journeys of anti-Vietnam War activists as a window into radical American and Vietnamese politics and culture in the 1960s. Its principal claim is as multipronged as its intended audience and intervention: in the 1960s American and Vietnamese antiwar activists created a transnational political community, beyond the confines of any nation-state or locality, based on a sustained critique of U.S. policy in Asia."

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This Week on the JuntoCast: The Constitution

One of the coolest features of the new blog The Junto ("a group blog on early American history") is "The JuntoCast," "a monthly podcast in which members of The Junto discuss issues of both academic and general interest related to early American history, pedagogy, and public history." LHB readers may be particularly interested in the most recent episode. Bloggers Kenneth Owen, Michael Hattem, Roy Rogers, and Tom Cutterham discuss "the Constitution of the United States, including recent historiography, its overall significance, and originalism."

New Release: Murphy, "Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States, by Teresa Anne Murphy (George Washington University). Here's a description from the Press:

Women's history emerged as a genre in the waning years of the eighteenth century, a period during which concepts of nationhood and a sense of belonging expanded throughout European nations and the young American republic. Early women's histories had criticized the economic practices, intellectual abilities, and political behavior of women while emphasizing the importance of female domesticity in national development. These histories had created a narrative of exclusion that legitimated the variety of citizenship considered suitable for women, which they argued should be constructed in a very different way from that of men: women's relationship to the nation should be considered in terms of their participation in civil society and the domestic realm. But the throes of the Revolution and the emergence of the first woman's rights movement challenged the dominance of that narrative and complicated the history writers' interpretation of women's history and the idea of domestic citizenship.

In Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States, Teresa Anne Murphy traces the evolution of women's history from the late eighteenth century to the time of the Civil War, demonstrating that competing ideas of women's citizenship had a central role in the ways those histories were constructed. This intellectual history examines the concept of domestic citizenship that was promoted in the popular writing of Sarah Josepha Hale and Elizabeth Ellet and follows the threads that link them to later history writers, such as Lydia Maria Child and Carolyn Dall, who challenged those narratives and laid the groundwork for advancing a more progressive woman's rights agenda. As woman's rights activists recognized, citizenship encompassed activities that ranged far beyond specific legal rights for women to their broader terms of inclusion in society, the economy, and government. Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States demonstrates that citizenship is at the heart of women's history and, consequently, that women's history is the history of nations.

A few blurbs:

"Teresa Anne Murphy's fascinating and important book not only reshapes our understanding of the field of women's history but is a valuable contribution to the historical literature on the political, civil, and intellectual status of women in the revolution and early republic."—Carol Faulkner, Syracuse University

"This thoughtful and stimulating intellectual history takes a fresh look at history writing by and about women between the American Revolution and Civil War. It makes an original and distinctive contribution by connecting changing narratives about women's history to larger debates about the nature of women's citizenship."—Anne M. Boylan, University of Delaware

More information, including an excerpt and the table of contents, is available here.

Goluboff on "Lawyers, Law and the New Civil Rights History"

Risa Goluboff (UVA--Law and History) has published "Lawyers, Law and the New Civil Rights History" in 126 Harvard Law Review 2312 (June 2013).  The piece is a review of Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer by Ken Mack  (Harvard Law). Goluboff's review takes the form of a very useful historiographic essay.  Mack replies with "Civil Rights History Old and New."

Update: I just want to second Tomiko on the importance of this exchange.  It strikes me as the likely point of departure for the legal historiography of the civil rights movement for the foreseeable future.  Further, analogous issues arise in the histories of other fields of law.  DRE