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• Introduction--
• 1. 'A Negro and by consequence an alien': local regulations and the making of race, 1500s-1700s--
• 2. The 'inconvenience" of black freedom: manumission, 1500s-1700s--
• 3. 'The natural right of all mankind': claiming freedom in the age of revolution, 1760s-1830--
• 4. 'Rules ... for their expulsion': foreclosing freedom, 1830s-1860--
• 5. 'Not of the same blood': policing racial boundaries, 1830s-1860-- Conclusion: 'Home-born citizens: the significance of free people of color.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 1. A Call from the Task Force
• 2. The Charleston Massacre
• 3. Becoming Richard Spencer
• 4. Reverend Edwards
• 5. The Charlottesville Monuments
• 6. Blut und Boden
• 7. Mr. Jefferson's University
• 8. Kessler v. Bellamy
• 9. The Monuments Debate
• 10. Competing Conceptions of Free Speech
• 11. May Days
• 12. Cue the Klan-Stage Right
• 13. The Rise of the Marketplace
• 14. Cue the Counterprotesters-Stage Left
• 15. A Rolling Stone Gathers No Facts
• 16. The Marketplace Doubles Down
• 17. The Day of the Clan
• 18. When Speech Advances Civil Rights
• 19. Duke and the Desciples
• 20. The Russian Connection
• 21. A Call to Conscience
• 22. Preparations
• 23. The Day to the Cross
• 24. The Idea of the University
• 25. Heckler's Veto
• 26. Channels of Communication
• 27. Rednecks and Saint Paul
• 28. The Lawn and the Rotunda
• 29. Bloodshed
• 30. Aftermath.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In the personal and frank Confessions of a Free Speech Lawyer, Rodney A. Smolla offers an insider's view on the violent confrontations in Charlottesville during the "summer of hate." Blending memoir, courtroom drama, and a consideration of the unhealed wound of racism in our society, he shines a light on the conflict between the value of free speech and the protection of civil rights. Smolla has spent his career in the thick of these tempestuous and fraught issues, from acting as lead counsel in a famous Supreme Court decision challenging Virginia's law against burning crosses, to serving as co-counsel in a libel suit brought by a fraternity against Rolling Stone magazine for publishing an article alleging that one of the fraternity's initiation rituals included gang rape. Smolla has also been active as a university leader, serving as dean of three law schools and president of one and railing against hate speech and sexual assault on US campuses. Well before the tiki torches cast their ominous shadows across the nation, the city of Charlottesville sought to relocate the Unite the Right rally; Smolla was approached to represent the alt-right groups. Though he declined, he came to wonder what his history of advocacy had wrought. Feeling unsettlingly complicit, he joined the Charlottesville Task Force, and he realized that the events that transpired there had meaning and resonance far beyond a singular time and place. Why, he wonders, has one of our foundational rights created a land in which such tragic clashes happen all too frequently?
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue: What's past?
• Confessions : of text and paratext
• Reading Luke in Southampton County
• The shudder of the thought
• The work of death : massacre, retribution
• On the guilt of fragile sovereigns
• Revulsions of capital : Virginia, 1829-32
• Epilogue: Demonic ambiguities

A bold new interpretation of Nat Turner and the slave rebellion that stunned the American South In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed. In the Matter of Nat Turner penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery and the dawning of his Christian faith, of an impossible task given to him by God, and of redemptive violence and profane retribution. Much about Turner remains unknown. His extraordinary account of his life and rebellion, given in chains as he awaited trial in jail, was written down by an opportunistic white attorney and sold as a pamphlet to cash in on Turner's notoriety. But the enigmatic rebel leader had an immediate and broad impact on the American South, and his rebellion remains one of the most momentous episodes in American history. Christopher Tomlins provides a luminous account of Turner's intellectual development, religious cosmology, and motivations, and offers an original and incisive analysis of the Turner Rebellion itself and its impact on Virginia politics. Tomlins also undertakes a deeply critical examination of William Styron's 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which restored Turner to the American consciousness in the era of civil rights, black power, and urban riots. A speculative history that recovers Turner from the few shards of evidence we have about his life, In the Matter of Nat Turner is also a unique speculation about the meaning and uses of history itself.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue
• April 16, 2007
• "Tragedy of monumental proportions"
• First steps
• "A deeper sense"
• When police call for help
• Accountability
• From a lifetime of silence
• "Back to day one"
• "Fire hose of suffering"
• Tower shadows
• "I will work this fight"
• The governor
• Texas half century
• Quiet carry
• Generations of advocacy
• The roads ahead
• April 16, 2017
• Epilogue.

In what has become the era of the mass shooting, we are routinely taken to scenes of terrible violence. Often neglected, however, is the long aftermath, including the efforts to effect change in the wake of such tragedies. On April 16, 2007, thirty-two Virginia Tech students and professors were murdered. Then the nation's deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman, the tragedy sparked an international debate on gun culture in the United States and safety on college campuses. Experiencing profound grief and trauma, and struggling to heal both physically and emotionally, many of the survivors from Virginia Tech and their supporters put themselves on the front lines to advocate for change. Yet since that April, large-scale gun violence has continued at a horrifying pace. In After Virginia Tech, award-winning journalist Thomas Kapsidelis examines the decade after the Virginia Tech massacre through the experiences of survivors and community members who advocated for reforms in gun safety, campus security, trauma recovery, and mental health. Undaunted by the expansion of gun rights, they continued their national leadership despite an often-hostile political environment and repeated mass violence. Kapsidelis also focuses on the trauma suffered by police who responded to the shootings, and the work by chaplains and a longtime police officer to create an organization dedicated to recovery. The stories Kapsidelis tells here show how people and communities affected by profound loss ultimately persevere long after the initial glare and attention inevitably fade. Reaching beyond policy implications, After Virginia Tech illuminates personal accounts of recovery and resilience that can offer a ray of hope to millions of Americans concerned about the consequences of gun violence.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: A battle over freedom
• African origins
• The voyage
• Virginia
• Property
• Transforming servitude
• Restrictions on population growth and civil liberties
• The Revolutionary War's impact on free Blacks
• Manumissions and status changes
• The anti-slavery slaveholding paradox
• Reversals, registration, kidnappings and social interactions
• The Civil War and Jim Crow
• Epilogue: Story replication

"This narrative nonfiction book contains stories of people of African origin who were never enslaved, born free, or who obtained liberty through court proceedings in the U.S. They lived in a society that sought to systematically deprive them of liberty and other human rights. This history of Free Blacks in Virginia reveals the human ability to persevere against adverse odds arising from the color of their skin, or their gender, or both. It interweaves legal history with stories of what happened to those African Americans who were free before the Civil War and lived their lives in the shadows of a complicated world"-- Provided by publisher

• The gerrymander monster
• The colonial background
• Representation in revolutionary Virginia
• A gerrymander in fact though not in name
• The Great Gerrymander of 1830
• The Great Gerrymander revised and disguised
• Disfranchisement replaces the Great Gerrymander
• Malapportionment in the twentieth century
• The Representation Revolution of the 1960s
• The representation Revolution in Virginia
• Partisan redistricting
• The political and legal landscapes in Virginia in 2019.

Many are aware that gerrymandering exists and suspect it plays a role in our elections, but its history goes far deeper, and its impacts are far greater, than most realize. In his latest book, Brent Tarter focuses on Virginia's long history of gerrymandering to uncover its immense influence on the state's politics and to provide perspective on how the practice impacts politics nationally.Offering the first in-depth historical study of gerrymanders in Virginia, Tarter exposes practices going back to nineteenth century and colonial times and explains how they protected land owners' and slave owners' interests. The consequences of redistricting and reapportionment in modern Virginia-in effect giving a partisan minority the upper hand in all public policy decisions-become much clearer in light of this history. Where the discussion of gerrymandering has typically emphasized political parties' control of Congress, Tarter focuses on the state legislatures that determine congressional district lines and, in most states, even those of their own districts. On the eve of the 2021 session of the General Assembly, which will redraw district lines for Virginia's state Senate and House of Delegates, as well as for the U.S. House of Representatives, Tarter's book provides an eye-opening investigation of gerrymandering and its pervasive effect on our local, state, and national politics and government.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• George Mason's earliest political writings
• George Mason, the Fairfax resolves, and other early writings
• George Mason and the Virginia Declaration of Rights
• George Mason and the Virginia Constitution of 1776
• George Mason and the Articles of Confederation
• George Mason and the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787
• George Mason and the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788
• George Mason, late life views of representation and evaluation

"Analysis of Founding Father George Mason's political writings and thought by a leading Constitutional history scholar, John R. Vile. Mason is primarily known for his refusal to sign the Constitution. His writings examined here, including substantial portions of the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, and his Objections to this Constitution of Government (1787) in opposition to ratification, have exercised a significant influence on American political thought and events. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Mason principally authored, served as a basis for the United States Bill of Rights, of which he has been deemed the father"-- Provided by publisher

• Introduction: July 4, 1791
• The facts of the fight
• The making of a Republican judge
• Examination : class, procedure, and local courts in Crane's Virginia
• The bloody code and the logic of legal reform
• Indictment : power shifts and power continuities in Virginia's courts
• Crane's trial and its "imperfect" verdict
• "That stigma on my character" : judges, judicial review, and "Republican" interpretation of the laws
• Murder or manslaughter? : Crane's special verdict at the General Court
• Pardon request : mercy and Crane's "lunatic fits"
• Conclusion: Making law sovereign in revolutionary Virginia.

On July 4, 1791, the fifteenth anniversary of American Independence, John Crane, a descendant of prominent Virginian families, killed his neighbor's harvest worker. Murder in the Shenandoah traces the story of this early murder case as it entangled powerful Virginians and addressed the question that everyone in the state was heatedly debating: what would it mean to have equality before the law - and a world where 'law is king'? By retelling the story of the case, called Commonwealth v. Crane, through the eyes of its witnesses, families, fighters, victims, judges, and juries, Jessica K. Lowe reveals how revolutionary debates about justice gripped the new nation, transforming ideas about law, punishment, and popular government.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue
• 'God, pleasee help us. We are your children, too'
• The 'civil war' after the Civil War
• The click of cosmic tumblers
• Balm for Gilead
• 'I'll fight with you on this'
• Into the sausage grinder
• Destroy the headline to save it?
• Wings for a prayer
• The eye of the storm
• Bound for civil rights history
• The promised land
• We gather our light
• Reparation within the sorrow
• 'For all wounds known and unknown'
• Epilogue: Will we live happily ever after? --- Afterword

• Introduction
• A brief feminist timeline of Virginia in the 1970s
• Origins
• The battle for the era
• Abortion rights and reproductive justice
• Ending violence against women
• Conclusion: Assessing progress and evaluating the path forward.

"In her innovative study of women activists in late twentieth-century Virginia, Megan Taylor Shockley argues that feminists challenged the traditional patriarchal system in the state by engaging directly with the legislature and mobilizing grassroots educational and lobbying efforts on the issues of the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion rights, and violence against women. Shockley suggests that feminists' work fundamentally changed Virginia, making it a better place for women, and helping to create a more progressive commonwealth. Using both archival sources and oral histories, her study examines who these activists were, what their motivations were in trying to battle recalcitrant legislators and conservative citizens, and what kinds of issues they gained ground on"-- Provided by publisher.

• Introduction
• Strictly political : racial and urban politics and the rise of the Richmond crusade for voters before 1965
• Systematically done in : black electoral empowerment, vote dilution, and the push for annexation after the Voting Rights Act
• From intent to effect : the long struggle for voting rights litigation during the 1970s
• "The dream is lost" : Henry Marsh and black governance in an era of white political resistance
• "All he gave me was a foot" : black technocrats, Richmond's urban woes, and the crisis of the crusade for voters
• Conclusion
• Appendix: City Council election data, City of Richmond, Virginia, 1960-1984.

Once the capital of the Confederacy and the industrial hub of slave-based tobacco production, Richmond, Virginia has been largely overlooked in the context of twentieth century urban and political history. By the early 1960s, the city served as an important center for integrated politics, as African Americans fought for fair representation and mobilized voters in order to overcome discriminatory policies. Richmond's African Americans struggled to serve their growing communities in the face of unyielding discrimination. Yet, due to their dedication to strengthening the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African American politicians held a city council majority by the late 1970s. In The Dream Is Lost, Julian Maxwell Hayter describes more than three decades of national and local racial politics in Richmond and illuminates the unintended consequences of civil rights legislation. He uses the city's experience to explain the political abuses that often accompany American electoral reforms and explores the arc of mid-twentieth-century urban history. In so doing, Hayter not only reexamines the civil rights movement's origins, but also seeks to explain the political, economic, and social implications of the freedom struggle following the major legislation of the 1960s. Hayter concludes his study in the 1980s and follows black voter mobilization to its rational conclusion - black empowerment and governance. However, he also outlines how Richmond's black majority council struggled to the meet the challenges of economic forces beyond the realm of politics. The Dream Is Lost vividly illustrates the limits of political power, offering an important view of an underexplored aspect of the post--civil rights era.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• English legal literature as a source of law and practice in seventeenth-century Virginia / Warren M. Billings
• Law books in the libraries of colonial Virginians / W. Hamilton Bryson
• The library of the council of colonial Virginia / Brent Tarter
• English statutes in Virginia, 1660-1714 / John Ruston Pagan
• John Mercer : merchant, lawyer, author, book collector / Bennie Brown
• The library reveals the man : George Wythe, legal and classical scholar / Linda K. Tesar
• The law library of a working attorney : the example of Patrick Henry / Kevin J. Hayes
• A Virginia original : George Webb's Office and authority of a justice of peace / Warren M. Billings
• A handbook for all : William Waller Hening's The new Virginia justice / R. Neil Hening
• St. George Tucker : judge, legal scholar, and reformer of Virginia law / Charles F. Hobson.

Virginia men of law constituted one of the first learned professions in colonial America, and Virginia legal culture had an important and lasting impact on American political institutions and jurisprudence. Exploring the book collections of these Virginians therefore offers insight into the history of the book and early American intellectual history. It also addresses essential questions of how English culture migrated to the American colonies and was transformed into a distinctive American culture. Focusing on the law books that colonial Virginians acquired, how they used them, and how they eventually produced a native-grown legal literature, this collection of essays explores important aspects of the law and intellectual culture of the commonwealth that reveal the origins of a distinctively Virginian legal literature. The contributors argue that the development of early Virginia legal history-as revealed through these book collections-not only illuminates important aspects of Virginia's history and culture; it also underlies a thorough understanding of colonial and revolutionary American history and culture.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• The Academical Village, the Rotunda Annex, and Minor Hall
• Clark Memorial Hall and the Allyn Cox murals
• The move to north grounds
• The creation of law grounds
• Conclusion.

As a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a masterwork of Thomas Jefferson, the "Academical Village" at the heart of the University of Virginia has long attracted the attention of visitors and scholars alike. Yet today Jefferson's original structures make up only a small fraction of a campus comprising over 1,600 acres. The Law School at the University of Virginia traces the history of one of the eight original schools of the University to study the development of the University Grounds over nearly two hundred years. In this book, Philip Mills Herrington relates the remarkable story of how the Law School and the University have used architecture to reconcile a desire for progress and expansion with a veneration for the past. In addition to providing a fascinating history of one of the oldest and most influential law schools in the United States, Herrington offers a valuable case study of the ways in which American universities have constructed, altered, and enhanced the built environment in response to the ever-changing demands of higher education and campus life.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

From acclaimed author Patricia Hruby Powell comes the story of a landmark civil rights case, told in spare and gorgeous verse. In 1955, in Caroline County, Virginia, amidst segregation and prejudice, injustice and cruelty, two teenagers fell in love. Their life together broke the law, but their determination would change it. Richard and Mildred Loving were at the heart of a Supreme Court case that legalized marriage between races, and a story of the devoted couple who faced discrimination, fought it, and won.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Argument: The split of authority over the question presented is well developed and mature; this case presents an ideal vehicle for resolving the conflict; the Virginia Supreme Court's decision is incorrect.

• The invitation to publish
• The testimony
• The argument to the jury
• The sentencing
• Appendix A: "Rape," a section from The new Virginia justice (1795), edited by William Waller Hening
• Appendix B: The trial of Jason Fairbanks (1801)
• Discussion ideas for the classroom
• Suggested reading.

On January 14, 1806, Sidney Hanson was raped by John Deskins on a rough gravel path in the woods in Tazewell County, Virginia. In the early nineteenth century, trials for rape were rare. Scanty court records typically lacked the detail needed to reconstruct the lives of those involved and evaluate the social and physical setting of the crime. Yet the events on that fateful day in 1806 would be the exception. In A Rape in the Early Republic, Randal L. Hall reproduces the complete trial testimony of Alexander Smyth, the prosecutor for Hanson's trial. Smyth's detailed record offers a revealing glimpse into how early rape cases moved through the legal system, first at the local level and then in the state's recently created district court system. It also shows that Deskins was not the only one on trial - Hanson's character was being scrutinized as well. Hall's introduction, rather than offering an analysis of Smyth's documents, provides important context and highlights historical themes that Hanson's situation illustrates. Featuring classroom discussion ideas and a list of suggested reading, A Rape in the Early Republic will be a valuable resource for students and scholars as well as anyone interested in gender, law, and society in the early republic.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: “In the course of human events ..."
• Jurisdiction and British legal memory in colonial Virginia
• New-modeling and rewriting in revolutionary Virginia
• Labor, language, and the legal subject of the notes on the State of Virginia
• Governing the usufruct of the living
• The discipline of recollection.

In this innovative book, historian Matthew Crow unpacks the legal and political thought of Thomas Jefferson as a tool for thinking about constitutional transformation, settler colonialism, and race and civic identity in the era of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson's practices of reading, writing, and collecting legal history grew out of broader histories of early modern empire and political thought. As a result of the peculiar ways in which he theorized and experienced the imperial crisis and revolutionary constitutionalism, Jefferson came to understand a republican constitution as requiring a textual, material culture of law shared by citizens with the cultivated capacity to participate in such a culture. At the center of the story in Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection, Crow concludes, we find legal history as a mode of organizing and governing collective memory, and as a way of instituting a particular form of legal subjectivity.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Fall 1787, first reactions
• Winter 1787-1788, jockeying for power
• Spring 1788, electing the delegates
• Summer 1788, debating in Richmond
• Summer 1788, deciding the question and the future.

In May 1788, the roads into Richmond overflowed with horses and stagecoaches. From every county, specially elected representatives made their way to the capital city for the Virginia Ratification Convention. Together, these delegates-zealous advocates selected by Virginia's deadlocked citizens-would decide to accept or reject the highly controversial United States Constitution, thus determining the fate of the American Republic. The rest of the country kept an anxious vigil, keenly aware that without the endorsement of Virginia-its largest and most populous state-the Constitution was doomed.In The Fate of the Revolution, Lorri Glover explains why Virginia's wrangling over ratification led to such heated political debate. Beginning in 1787, when they first learned about the radical new government design, Virginians had argued about the proposed Constitution's meaning and merits. The convention delegates, who numbered among the most respected and experienced patriots in Revolutionary America, were roughly split in their opinions. Patrick Henry, for example, the greatest orator of the age, opposed James Madison, the intellectual force behind the Constitution. The two sides were so evenly matched that in the last days of the convention, the savviest political observers still could not confidently predict the outcome.Mining an incredible wealth of sources, including letters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and transcripts, Glover brings these remarkable political discussions to life. She raises the provocative, momentous constitutional questions that consumed Virginians, echoed across American history, and still resonate today. This engaging book harnesses the uncertainty and excitement of the Constitutional debates to show readers the clear departure the Constitution marked, the powerful reasons people had to view it warily, and the persuasive claims that Madison and his allies finally made with success.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Carrie Buck
• Albert Priddy
• Albert Priddy
• Harry Laughlin
• Harry Laughlin
• Aubrey Strode
• Aubrey Strode
• Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Carrie Buck.

"One of America's great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court's infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of "undesirable" citizens the law of the land New York Times bestselling author Adam Cohen tells the story in Imbeciles of one of the darkest moments in the American legal tradition: the Supreme Court's decision to champion eugenic sterilization for the greater good of the country. In 1927, when the nation was caught up in eugenic fervor, the justices allowed Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, a perfectly normal young woman, for being an "imbecile." It is a story with many villains, from the superintendent of the Dickensian Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded who chose Carrie for sterilization to the former Missouri agriculture professor and Nazi sympathizer who was the nation's leading advocate for eugenic sterilization. But the most troubling actors of all were the eight Supreme Court justices who were in the majority--including William Howard Taft, the former president; Louis Brandeis, the legendary progressive; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., America's most esteemed justice, who wrote the decision urging the nation to embark on a program of mass eugenic sterilization"-- Provided by publisher.

• Early Life
• Law and Politics
• Frascati
• Protective Tariff
• Internal Improvements
• Barbour vs. Marshall
• The Missouri Crisis
• Speaker of the House
• Frustration and Resignation
• Rise of a Jacksonian
• Triumph of Republicanism
• Patronage and Politics
• Supreme Court
• Last Days.

William S. Belko's Phillip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America provides the first comprehensive biography of a pivotal yet nearly forgotten statesman who made numerous key contributions to a transformative period of early American history. Barbour, a Virginia lawyer, participated in America's transition from a mostly republican government to a truer majority democracy, notably while serving as the twelfth Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and later as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. After being elected to the US Congress during the War of 1812, Barbour also emerged as one of the foremost champions of states' rights, consistently and energetically fighting against expansions of federal powers. He, along with other Jeffersonian Old Republicans, opposed federal plans for a national tariff and internal improvements. Later, Barbour became one of the first Jeffersonian politicians to join the Jacksonian Democrats in Jackson's war against a national bank. Barbour continued to make crucial strides in support of states' rights after taking his seat on the United States Supreme Court in 1836 under Chief Justice Roger Taney. He contributed to the Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge and Briscoe v. Bank of Kentucky decisions, which bolstered states' rights. He also delivered the opinion of the court in New York v. Miln, which provided the basis for the State Police Powers Doctrine. Expertly interweaving biography, history, political science, and jurisprudence, Phillip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America remembers the man whose personal life and career were emblematic of the decades in which the United States moved from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Jackson, contributing to developments that continue to animate American politics today.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)