Showing results for "peter charles hoffer"

The story of a unique friendship in colonial America between a Founding Father and a founder of the evangelical movement.In the 1740s, two very different developments revolutionized Anglo-American life and thought—the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening. This book takes an encounter between the paragons of each movement—the printer and entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin and the British-born revivalist George Whitefield—as an opportunity to explore the meaning of the ...

"A fine study . . . by a prolific scholar who adeptly restores the Salem Gunpowder Raid to its rightful place in the history of the American Revolution." — New England QuarterlyOn April 19, 1775, British raids on Lexington Green and Concord Bridge made history, but it was an episode nearly two months earlier in Salem, Massachusetts, that set the stage for the hostilities. Peter Charles Hoffer has discovered records and newspaper accounts of a British gunpow...

The distinguished historian "does a remarkable job" with this lively and comprehensive textbook—now in a new, expanded edition (Daniel P. Kotzin, Teaching History).The Brave New World covers the span of early American history, from 30,000 years before Europeans ever landed on North American shores to creation of the new nation. With its exploration of the places and peoples of early America, this volume brings together the most recent scholarship on the col...

Woodrow Wilson, a practicing academic historian before he took to politics, defined the importance of history: "A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today." He, like many men of his generation, wanted to impose a version of America's founding identity: it was a land of the free and a home of the brave. But not the braves. Or the slaves. Or the disenfranchised women. So the history of Wilson's generation omitted a significant proportion of the populat...

An essential, rigorous, and lively introduction to the beginnings of American law.How did American colonists transform British law into their own? What were the colonies' first legal institutions, and who served in them? And why did the early Americans develop a passion for litigation that continues to this day?In Law and People in Colonial America, Peter Charles Hoffer tells the story of early American law from its beginnings on the British mainla...

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 updated the most readable, astute single-volume history of this venerated institution with a new chapter on the Roberts Court.The Supreme Court chronicles an institution that dramatically evolved from s...

Three and a half decades before the city of New York witnessed the first great battle waged by the new United States of America for its independence, rumors of a massive conspiracy among the city’s slaves spread panic throughout the colony. On the testimony of frightened bondsmen and a handful of whites, over seventy slaves were convicted and a third of these were executed.The suspected conspiracy in New York prompted one of the most extensive slave trials in colonial history and s...

Examining the congressional debates on antislavery petitions before the Civil War.Passed by the House of Representatives at the start of the 1836 session, the gag rule rejected all petitions against slavery, effectively forbidding Congress from addressing the antislavery issue until it was rescinded in late 1844. In the Senate, a similar rule lasted until 1850. Strongly supported by all southern and some northern Democratic congressmen, the gag rule became a proxy ...

Finalist, 2025 PROSE Awards: Legal Studies and CriminologyA history of the humble footnote and its impact on the highest court in the landIn May 2022, a seismic legal event occurred as the draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was leaked. The majority aimed to eliminate constitutional protection for abortion. Amidst the fervor, an unnoticed detail emerged: over 140 footnotes accompanied the majority opinion and ...

How three skilled orators navigated a polarized political landscapeFor the generation of politicians who inherited the Republic and the Union, the opening months of 1850 were a desperate time filled with increasing animosity between free and slave state leaders over issues of the expansion of slavery. Following the end of the Mexican-American War and the subsequent expansion of American territory came a series of fiery debates over how this new territory would be g...

Langum Prize, Honorable MentionAaron Burr was an enigma even in his own day. Founding father and vice president, he engaged in a duel with Alexander Hamilton resulting in a murder indictment that effectively ended his legal career. And when he turned his attention to entrepreneurial activities on the frontier he was suspected of empire building—and worse.Burr was finally arrested as a threat to national security, under suspicion of fomenting insurrection ag...

Few Supreme Court decisions have stirred up as much controversy, vitriolic debate, and even violence as Roe v. Wade in 1973. Four decades later, it remains a touchstone for the culture wars in the United States and a pivot upon which much of our politics turns. With that in mind, N. E. H. Hull and Peter Charles Hoffer have taken stock of the abortion debates, controversies, and cases that have emerged during the past decade in order to update their best-selling book on this landma...