Edwards to Lecture on “Women, Law, and Culture: Rethinking Legal Change in the Civil War Era"

[Our friends at Oregon Law send us the following announcement.]

The Law, Culture, and Humanities Initiative presents “Women, Law, and Culture: Rethinking Legal Change in the Civil War Era,” with Laura Edwards, Thursday, October 3, 2013, 12:30 – 2:00 p.m., Lewis Lounge, Knight Law Center, University of Oregon.

Laura F. Edwards received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is now Professor of History at Duke University. Her interests focus on race, gender, labor, and law, especially in the nineteenth-century U.S. South. She just completed a legal history of the Civil War and Reconstruction titled A Nation of Rights. Most recently, she is the author of The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), which was awarded the American Historical Association’s 2009 Littleton-Griswold prize for the best book in law and society and the Southern Historical Association’s Charles Sydnor prize for the best book in southern history. In addition, she is author of Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (University of Illinois Press, 1997). She has received fellowships from the Newberry Library, the National Humanities Center, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She also has been honored with the Howard D. Johnson award for distinguished undergraduate teaching, given by the College Arts and Sciences at Duke University and the Dean’s Award for Excellent Mentoring, given by the Graduate School at Duke University.

RSVP to Sabrina Leathers: leathers@uoregon.edu [ASAP].

Cosponsored by Oregon Humanities Center, Center for the Study of Women in Society, Office of the Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion, Department of Political Science, School of Law Lectures and Awards, Department of History, and Office of Academic Affairs.

The Law, Culture, and Humanities Initiative was created to facilitate, support, and encourage symposia, lectures, scholarship, and faculty discussion on the relationship between law and other humanistic disciplines. It provides opportunities for faculty to integrate humanistic-based studies with the study of law, and to explore the increasingly diverse and rich scholarships in areas that include (but are not limited to) legal history, law and literature, law and anthropology, and law and philosophy.

Approval Rates of Black and White Marriage

A recent article from Gallup based on their Minority Rights and Relations poll, conducted June 13-July 5 which surveyed 4,373 Americans, including 1,010 non-Hispanic Blacks reports one of the largest shifts of public opinion in Gallup history, 87% of Americans now favor marriage between Blacks and Whites, up from 4% in 1958. The report explained its findings:

Approval of marriages between Blacks and Whites is up one percentage point from 2011, when this attitude was last measured. Approval has generally increased in a linear fashion from Gallup's first measure in 1958, reaching the majority threshold in 1997, and crossing the three-quarters line in 2004. Eleven percent of Americans today say they disapprove of Black-White marriage, compared with 94% who disapproved in 1958.

Blacks' approval of Black-White marriage (96%) is now nearly universal, while Whites' approval is 12 percentage points lower, at 84%. Blacks' approval has consistently been higher than Whites' over the decades, although attitudes among both racial groups have generally moved in a parallel manner since 1968, when Gallup was first able to report reliable estimates of each group's opinion. The gap between Black approval and White approval in recent years has been smaller than it was prior to 1997.

Read the full article here:  http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx

June 2013 Issue of Reviews in American History

The June 2013 issue of Reviews in American History is out. Although full text is limited to subscribers, we'll spotlight some items of interest:

The Constitution Goes Public: Politics and the Ratification Debate -- Todd Estes (Oakland University) reviews Jürgen Heideking, The Constitution before the Judgment Seat: The Prehistory and Ratification of the American Constitution, 1787–1791 (John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffler, eds.) (University of Virginia Press, 2012).

The Inventor’s Dilemma—The Confederate Version -- William G. Thomas (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) reviews H. Jackson Knight, Confederate Invention: The Story of the Confederate States Patent Office and Its Inventors (Louisiana State University Press).

Social Reform through Social Exclusion --Thomas J. Humphrey (Cleveland State University) reviews Craig Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, The Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell, eds., Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America (University of Georgia Press, 2012).

Officers sans Army -- Erik S. Gellman (Roosevelt University) reviews Shawn Leigh Alexander, An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP (Pennsylvania University Press, 2012).

The Many Faces of Judicial Independence -- Charles Zelden (Nova Southeastern University) reviews Jed Handelsman Shugerman, The People’s Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America (Harvard University Press, 2012).

New Release: Zackin, "Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places"

New from Princeton University Press: Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America's Positive Rights (2013), by Emily Zackin (Department of Political Science, Hunter College, City University of New York). Here's a description from the Press:

Unlike many national constitutions, which contain explicit positive rights to such things as education, a living wage, and a healthful environment, the U.S. Bill of Rights appears to contain only a long list of prohibitions on government. American constitutional rights, we are often told, protect people only from an overbearing government, but give no explicit guarantees of governmental help. Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood the American rights tradition. The United States actually has a long history of enshrining positive rights in its constitutional law, but these rights have been overlooked simply because they are not in the federal Constitution.

Emily Zackin shows how they instead have been included in America's state constitutions, in large part because state governments, not the federal government, have long been primarily responsible for crafting American social policy. Although state constitutions, seemingly mired in trivial detail, can look like pale imitations of their federal counterpart, they have been sites of serious debate, reflect national concerns, and enshrine choices about fundamental values. Zackin looks in depth at the history of education, labor, and environmental reform, explaining why America's activists targeted state constitutions in their struggles for government protection from the hazards of life under capitalism.

Shedding much-needed light on the variety of reasons that activists pursued the creation of new state-level rights, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places challenges us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the American constitutional tradition.

Emily Zackin (credit)

The blurbs are impressive. Here are a few:

"Emily Zackin argues that the United States has a long history of positive rights protection, created and fostered by political outsiders who wanted to change society and disrupt the status quo. We will find this tradition not in the federal constitution, but in our country's many state constitutions. This is a crucially important book revealing an unjustly neglected feature of America's constitutional traditions."--Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School

"This is an extremely important book that will be widely discussed. One of the pathologies of the standard approach to American constitutionalism is its exclusive focus on the U.S. Constitution and the concomitant ignorance of the rich materials to be found in the literally dozens of American state constitutions. This book will be an extremely important wake-up call for most readers."--Sanford Levinson, author of Constitutional Faith

The TOC:

Chapter 1: Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places 1
Chapter 2: Of Ski Trails and State Constitutions: Silly Details or Serious Principles? 18
Chapter 3: Defining Positive Rights 36
Chapter 4: Why Write New Rights?: Understanding Constitutional Development Apart From Entrenchment 48
Chapter 5: Education: A Long Tradition of Positive Rights in America 67
Chapter 6: Workers' Rights: Constitutional Protections Where (and When) We Would Least Expect Them 106
Chapter 7: Environmental Protection: Positive Constitutional Rights in the Late Twentieth Century 146
Chapter 8: Conclusion 197

The first chapter is available here.