Interbellum Constitution

Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms

Inbunden, Engelska, 2024

639 kr

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A synthesis of legal, political, and social history to show how the post-founding generations were forced to rethink and substantially revise the U.S. constitutional vision Between 1815 and 1861, American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity. The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles, combined with a thoroughgoing commitment to investing those principles with meaning through debate. Each of these shared principles—commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity—concerned what we now call “federalism,” meaning that they pertain to the relationships among multiple levels of government with varying degrees of autonomy. Alison L. LaCroix argues, however, that there existed many more federalisms in the early nineteenth century than today’s constitutional debates admit. As LaCroix shows, this was a period of intense rethinking of the very basis of the U.S. national model—a problem debated everywhere, from newspapers and statehouses to local pubs and pulpits, ultimately leading both to civil war and to a new, more unified constitutional vision. This book is the first that synthesizes the legal, political, and social history of the early nineteenth century to show how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2024-08-13
Mått156 x 235 x 38 mm
Vikt990 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieYale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference
Antal sidor576
FörlagYale University Press
ISBN9780300223217

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Winner of the 2025 SHEAR Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early Republic“No scholar is better equipped to challenge our understanding of the history of federalism than Alison LaCroix. In this pioneering study, she recovers the spirited, contingent, decades-long argument that shaped an era that most constitutional historians have dismissed as uneventful. Essential reading.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States“Alison LaCroix’s invaluable book is a fount of information and brilliant insights about a grievously neglected period of American constitutional development. It is often gripping in the stories it relates. This is truly essential reading.”—Sanford Levinson, author of An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century“A brilliant, alternately rollicking and harrowing account of the law in action in the nineteenth-century United States. Prodigiously researched and bristling with startling revisionist arguments, this book is far and away the best account of the roiling world of American federalism in the crucial decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The Interbellum Constitution carries urgent lessons for the emerging federal-state battles of our times.”—John Fabian Witt, author of American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19