Böcker av Linda Myrsiades

"Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection examines the legal context in which the Whiskey Rebellion was situated, with an eye towards how it was constructed both in the jurisprudence of the courts and in the vernacular ideology of popular dissent. The rationale for such a study lies in the connection between the 1790s and today and the prospect that the innovative experiment represented by U. S. democracy might die, which made the insurrection a crucible for testing the new nation's Constitution and laws and the government they established.?Extending its understanding of legal culture beyond established courts, the study expands materials treating the rebel contribution to legal culture by examining assembly speeches, petitions, and popular courts as well as street politics and propaganda to allow us to balance rebel, government, and judicial perspectives"--

From Treason to Runaway Slaves provides case studies of high-profile trials from the early republic examined in terms of the period¿s history, law, and culture. It focuses on a historical period and place crucial to identity formation in the new nation and the survival of the U. S. as a democratic experiment.

Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America: Dissecting the Rush v. Cobbett Trial, 1799 offers the first deep analysis of the most important libel trial in post-revolutionary America and an approach to understanding a much-studied revolutionary figure, Benjamin Rush, in a new light as a legal subject. This libel trial faced off the new nation's most prestigious physician-patriot, Benjamin Rush, against its most popular journalist, William Cobbett, the editor of Porcupine's Gazette. Studied by means of a rare and substantial surviving transcript, the trial features six litigating counsel whose narrative of events and roles provides a unique view of how the revolutionary generation saw itself and the legacy it wished to leave to its progeny. The trial is structured by assaults against medical bleeding and its premier practitioner in yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s in Philadelphia, on the one hand, and castigates the licentiousness of the press in the nation's then-capital city, on the other. As it does so, it exemplifies the much-derided litigiousness of the new nation and the threat of sedition that characterized the development of political parties and the partisan press in late eighteenth-century America.