Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Recent H-Law reviews: Cahill, O'Brien, Mathieu

H-Law has posted several book reviews of interest over the past few weeks:

Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Reviewer Jonathan H. Grandage (Florida State University) praises Cahill for "shed[ding] light on the lives of Indian Service employees, typically overlooked by scholars who take a top-down approach to the historical relationship between the United States government and Native American tribes." In Grandage's view, Cahill also "argues persuasively for the importance of the Indian Service to understanding the emergence of the modern American state." Read more here.

David M. O'Brien, Congress Shall Make No Law: The First Amendment, Unprotected Expression, and the Supreme Court (Lanham  Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). Reviewer Donald Rogers (Central Connecticut State University) stresses "the book's doctrinal and topical arrangement," which has its strengths but "neglects the unfolding sociopolitical context of unprotected speech law." Read more here.

Sarah-Jane Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). According to reviewer Christopher Taylor (University of Western Ontario), the book "explores the compelling relationship between the politics of race and the growth of a new nation, and how black Canadian immigrants navigated and existed within the institutionalized structures of race and legislated xenophobia." Mathieu's "comparative methodology and study of several different black ethnic experiences in Canada" brings something fresh to a topic that other historians have covered. Read more here.

Also reviewed:

Andrew Wolpert, K. A. Kapparis, eds., Legal Speeches of Democratic Athens: Sources for Athenian History (Hackett Pub., 2011). Reviewed here by John Nicols (University of Oregon).

Paul Kens, The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874-1888 (University of South Carolina Press, 2010). (Mentioned in an earlier post here.) Reviewed here by Ian J. Drake.