History Commons^™

Empathy And Judgment, Thomas Morawetz

Thomas H. Morawetz

Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Pp. xvii, 137. $20. Reclaiming the place of philosophy as a metadiscipline, philosophers have once more assumed the role of mediating boundary disputes among other disciplines. As the boundaries and shapes of various disciplines have grown vague and controversial, that role has become particularly significant and particularly quixotic as well. Those who play this role have many audiences. Some speak primarily to, and about, scholars. Others concern themselves with pedagogy. Still others think about the impact of the disciplines on public officials and public affairs. …

Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical, Judith Smith

Judith E. Smith

A son of poor Jamaican immigrants who grew up in Depression-era Harlem, Harry Belafonte became the first black performer to gain artistic control over the representation of African Americans in commercial television and film. Forging connections with an astonishing array of consequential players on the American scene in the decades following World War II—from Paul Robeson to Ed Sullivan, John Kennedy to Stokely Carmichael—Belafonte established his place in American culture as a hugely popular singer, matinee idol, internationalist, and champion of civil rights, black pride, and black power.

In Becoming Belafonte, Judith E. Smith presents the first full-length interpretive …

America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai

Robert L Tsai

The U.S. Constitution opens by proclaiming the sovereignty of all citizens: "We the People." Robert Tsai's gripping history of alternative constitutions invites readers into the circle of those who have rejected this ringing assertion--the defiant groups that refused to accept the Constitution's definition of who "the people" are and how their authority should be exercised. America's Forgotten Constitutions is the story of America as told by dissenters: squatters, Native Americans, abolitionists, socialists, internationalists, and racial nationalists. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Tsai chronicles eight episodes in which discontented citizens took the extraordinary step of drafting a new constitution. He examines …

Predictions And Nudges: What Behavioral Economics Has To Offer The Humanities, And Vice-Versa, Anne Dailey, Peter Siegelman

Peter Siegelman

Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. 304. $26.00. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Pp. 280. $25.95. The informed law and humanities reader can hardly fail to be aware that the field of economics has undergone a "behavioral revolution" over the past several decades, and that this revolution has spilled over into the legal academy. Open an economics journal these days and you are likely to find any number of articles billing themselves as "behavioral" …

The Road To Mass Democracy: Original Intent And The Seventeenth Amendment, Christopher Hoebeke

Christopher H Hoebeke

Until 1913 and passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, US senators were elected by state legislatures, not directly by the people. Progressive Era reformers urged this revision in answer to the corruption of state "machines" under the dominance of party bosses. They also believed that direct elections would make the Senate more responsive to popular concerns regarding the concentrations of business, capital, and labor that in the industrial era gave rise to a growing sense of individual voicelessness. Popular control over the higher affairs of government was thought to be possible, since the spread of information …

Making Claims: Indian Litigants And The Expansion Of The English Legal World In The Eighteenth Century, Arthur Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

This paper explores the British Imperial legal world of the mid-eighteenth century. Within this period, the previously confined spaces of English law and legal institutions became open to an ever widening set of legal subjects, both people as well as places. The paper focuses on what was at the time perhaps England’s most remote and murkily defined legal space, the East India Company (EIC) settlements at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. The paper shows how a series of legal actors: metropolitan judges, Indian litigants and elite lawyers, first bridged the legal worlds of England and the subcontinent. I argue that by …