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 ...

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...

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...

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...

The Great Emu War, which unfolded in Australia in 1932, stands as one of the most peculiar conflicts in history, pitting humans against a flightless bird. Following World War I, many Australian veterans were given land to farm in Western Australia. However, their efforts were thwarted by an unexpected adversary: the emu population. These large, flightless birds descended upon the newly cultivated fields, wreaking havoc on crops and causing significant economic strain for the farmers. As th...

The Great Emu War, which unfolded in Australia in 1932, stands as one of the most peculiar conflicts in history, pitting humans against a flightless bird. Following World War I, many Australian veterans were given land to farm in Western Australia. However, their efforts were thwarted by an unexpected adversary: the emu population. These large, flightless birds descended upon the newly cultivated fields, wreaking havoc on crops and causing significant economic strain for the farmers. As th...

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...

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...

There are moments in American history when all eyes are focused on a federal court: when its bench speaks for millions of Americans, and when its decision changes the course of history. More often, the story of the federal judiciary is simply a tale of hard work: of finding order in the chaotic system of state and federal law, local custom, and contentious lawyering. The Federal Courts is a story of all of these courts and the judges and justices who served on them, of the case la...

In the Civil War, the United States and the Confederate States of America engaged in combat to defend distinct legal regimes and the social order they embodied and protected. Depending on whose side's arguments one accepted, the Constitution either demanded the Union's continuance or allowed for its dissolution. After the war began, rival legal concepts of insurrection (a civil war within a nation) and belligerency (war between sovereign enemies) vied for adherents in federal and Confedera...