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Explores the influence of Dutch law and jurisprudence in colonial America.
No society can function without laws, that set of established practices and expectations that guide the way people get along with one another and relate to ruling authorities. Although much has been written about the English roots of American law and jurisprudence, little attention has been paid until recently to the legacy left by the Dutch. In Opening Statements, a broad...
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A historical and legal examination of the conflict and interplay between settler and indigenous laws in the New World
As British and Iberian empires expanded across the New World, differing notions of justice and legality played out against one another as settlers and indigenous people sought to negotiate their relationship. In order for settlers and natives to learn from, maneuver, resist, or accommodate each other, they had to grasp something of...
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Combining legal and social history, Bruce Mann explores the relationship between law and society from the mid-seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution. Analyzing a sample of more than five thousand civil cases from the records of local courts in Connecticut, he shows how once-neighborly modes of disputing yielded to a legal system that treated neighbors and strangers alike.During the colonial period population growth, immigration, economic...
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This collection of seventeen original essays reshapes the field of early American legal history not by focusing simply on law, or even on the relationship between law and society, but by using the concept of "legality" to explore the myriad ways in which the people of early America ordered their relationships with one another, whether as individuals, groups, classes, communities, or states.Addressing issues of gender, ethnicity, family, patriarchy,...
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The early American legal system permeated the lives of colonists and reflected their sense of what was right and wrong, honorable and dishonorable, moral and immoral. In a compelling book full of the extraordinary stories of ordinary people, Elaine Forman Crane reveals the ways in which early Americans clashed with or conformed to the social norms established by the law. As trials throughout the country reveal, alleged malefactors such as witches,...
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An accusation of attempted murder rudely interrupted Mary Arnold's dalliances with working men and her extensive shopping sprees. When her husband Benedict fell deathly ill and then asserted she had tried to kill him with poison, the result was a dramatic petition for divorce. The case before the Rhode Island General Assembly and its tumultuous aftermath, during which Benedict died, made Mary a cause célèbre in Newport through the winter of 1738...
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In mid-sixteenth-century England, people were born into authority and responsibility based on their social status. Thus elite children could designate property or serve in Parliament, while children of the poorer sort might be forced to sign labor contracts or be hanged for arson or picking pockets. By the late eighteenth century, however, English and American law began to emphasize contractual relations based on informed consent rather than on birth...
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By recovering a largely forgotten English Renaissance mindset that regarded sovereignty and Providence as being fundamentally entwined, Alexander Haskell reconnects concepts historians had before treated as separate categories and argues that the first English planters in Virginia operated within a deeply providential age rather than an era of early modern entrepreneurialism. These men did not merely settle Virginia; they and their London-based sponsors...
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Women before the Bar is the first study to investigate changing patterns of women's participation in early American courts across a broad range of legal actions--including proceedings related to debt, divorce, illicit sex, rape, and slander. Weaving the stories of individual women together with systematic analysis of gendered litigation patterns, Cornelia Dayton argues that women's relation to the courtroom scene in early New England shifted from...
11) John Adams under fire: the founding father's fight for justice in the Boston Massacre murder trial
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"'An expert, extremely detailed account of John Adams' finest hour.'--Kirkus Reviews. Honoring the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Massacre The New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln's Last Trial and host of LivePD Dan Abrams and David Fisher tell the story of a trial that would change history. History remembers John Adams as a Founding Father and our country's second president. But in the tense years before the American Revolution, he was still...
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In the mid-seventeenth century, judges in the short-lived New Haven Colony presided over a remarkable series of trials ranging from murder and bestiality, to drunken sailors, frisky couples, faulty shoes, and shipwrecks. The cases were reported in an unusually vivid manner, allowing readers to witness the twists and turns of fortune as the participants battled with life and liberty at stake.
When the records were eventually published in the 1850s,...
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