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During his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the
questions legal historians ask. "The Transformation of American
Law, 1780 1860" (1977) disclosed the many ways that judge-made law
favored commercial and property interests and remade law to promote
economic growth. "The Transformation of American Law, 1870 1960"
(1992) continued that project, with a focus on ideas that reshaped
law as we struggled for objective and neutral legal responses to
our country s crises.
In this book, Horwitz s students re-examine legal history from
America s colonial era to the late twentieth century. They ask
classic Horwitzian questions, of how legal doctrine, thought, and
practice are shaped by the interests of the powerful, as well as by
the ideas of lawyers, politicians, and others. The essays address
current questions in legal history, from colonial legal practice to
questions of empire, civil rights, and constitutionalism in a
democracy. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original
as they continue his transformation of American legal history.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the James Bradford Best
Biography Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American
Republic Finalist, Literary Award for Nonfiction, Library of
Virginia Finalist, George Washington Prize James Madison's Notes on
the 1787 Constitutional Convention have acquired nearly
unquestioned authority as the description of the U.S.
Constitution's creation. No document provides a more complete
record of the deliberations in Philadelphia or depicts the
Convention's charismatic figures, crushing disappointments, and
miraculous triumphs with such narrative force. But how reliable is
this account? "[A] superb study of the Constitutional Convention as
selectively reflected in Madison's voluminous notes on
it...Scholars have been aware that Madison made revisions in the
Notes but have not intensively explored them. Bilder has looked
closely indeed at the Notes and at his revisions, and the result is
this lucid, subtle book. It will be impossible to view Madison's
role at the convention and read his Notes in the same uncomplicated
way again...An accessible and brilliant rethinking of a crucial
moment in American history." -Robert K. Landers, Wall Street
Journal
In this provocative new biography, Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the
1780s-the Age of the Constitution-to investigate the rise of a
radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius.
Bilder finds the perfect exemplar of this phenomenon in
English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O'Connor. This pathbreaking
female educator delivered a University of Pennsylvania lecture
attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional
Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia. As the first such
public female lecturer, her courageous performance likely inspired
the gender-neutral language of the Constitution. Female Genius
reconstructs Eliza Harriot's transatlantic life, from Lisbon to
Charleston, paying particular attention to her lectures and to the
academies she founded, inspiring countless young American women to
consider a college education and a role in the political forum.
Promoting the ideas made famous by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza
Harriot brought the concept of female genius to the United States.
Its advocates argued that women had equal capacity and deserved an
equal education and political representation. Its detractors, who
feared it undermined male political power, felt deeply threatened.
By 1792 Eliza Harriot experienced struggles that reflected the
larger backlash faced by women and people of color as new written
constitutions provided the political and legal tools for exclusion
based on sex, gender, and race. In recovering this pioneering life,
the richly illustrated Female Genius makes clear that America's
framing moment did not belong solely to white men and offers an
inspirational transatlantic history of women who believed in
education as a political right.
Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history,
Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture
developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten
transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants
on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this
constitution--that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant
to the laws of England but could diverge for local
circumstances--shaped the legal development of the colonial world.
Focusing on practices rather than doctrines, Bilder describes
how the pragmatic and flexible conversation about this constitution
shaped colonial law: the development of the legal profession; the
place of English law in the colonies; the existence of equity
courts and legislative equitable relief; property rights for women
and inheritance laws; commercial law and currency reform; and laws
governing religious establishment. Using as a case study the
corporate colony of Rhode Island, which had the largest number of
appeals of any mainland colony to the English Privy Council, she
reconstructs a largely unknown world of pre-Constitutional legal
culture.
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