12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Theme
Justice Law
295 works in the library take up justice law, from The Bible to The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium.
Works
John Adams wrote A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in London, where he was serving as the first American minister to Great Britain. The occasion was a letter of 1778 from the French statesman Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot to the English minister Richard Price, published by Price in 1784, which regretted that most American states had imitated England with a governor, a council and an assembly instead of collecting all authority into one centre, the nation.
A Disquisition on Government is John C. Calhoun's general theory of constitutional government, completed in 1849 in the last year of his life and published in 1851 by his editor Richard K. Crallé as the first part of volume one of his Works. It was meant as the theoretical introduction to a companion study, A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, which the library text omits.
The title play, A Doll's House (1879), takes place over three days of Christmas in the comfortable Norwegian home of Torvald Helmer, a newly appointed bank manager, and his wife Nora, whom he treats as a charming pet, calling her his songbird and squirrel. Years earlier, when Torvald was gravely ill and doctors advised a year in Italy, Nora secretly borrowed the money from the lawyer Krogstad, forging her dying father's signature as guarantor.
A Letter Concerning Toleration is John Locke's argument that the civil government and the church are two distinct societies with different ends, and that the magistrate has no authority to compel belief or worship. Locke wrote it in Latin, as Epistola de Tolerantia, during the winter of 1685–86 while living in exile in the Dutch Republic, addressing it to his friend the Remonstrant theologian Philipp van Limborch.
A Model of Christian Charity is a lay sermon or discourse that John Winthrop composed in 1630 for the company of Puritan emigrants he was leading from England to Massachusetts Bay. The surviving heading says it was written in his passage across the Atlantic, and it has traditionally been pictured as preached aboard the flagship Arbella, though some historians think it was delivered before the fleet sailed or circulated in manuscript.
A Modest Proposal is Swift's savage 1729 pamphlet on Irish poverty under British rule, written in the voice of a projector who treats hunger, tenancy, children, and mothers as items in a national account. The speaker begins with beggars and starving children in Dublin streets, then adopts the language of calculation: numbers of infants, costs of nursing, market value, culinary uses, and benefits to landlords.
A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia is one of the most important public-health and Black-authored documents of the early United States. Written by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones after the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1793, it answers Mathew Carey's published accusations that Black Philadelphians profited from disaster or behaved badly during the crisis.
A Tale of Two Cities moves between London and Paris from 1775 to the Reign of Terror in 1793-94. In Book the First, Recalled to Life, Jarvis Lorry, a clerk of Tellson's Bank, travels by the Dover mail and sends back the cryptic message Recalled to life by the porter Jerry Cruncher.
A Theologico-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) was published anonymously in Latin in Amsterdam in 1670, under a false Hamburg imprint, by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Its title page announces its purpose: to show that freedom to philosophize can be granted without harm to piety or the peace of the commonwealth, and cannot be withheld without destroying both.
A Theory of Justice is the major work of the American philosopher John Rawls, published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 1971 after nearly two decades of articles on the same themes. Rawls sets out to offer an alternative to utilitarianism, the view that the right policy is whatever produces the greatest total happiness, which he thought had dominated modern moral and political philosophy.
Pinel presents insanity as a medical and moral problem rather than a condition to be met chiefly with chains, spectacle, or punishment. The treatise moves between nosology, institutional observation, and therapeutic counsel.
A View from the Bridge is set among the Italian-American longshoremen of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and is framed by the commentary of Alfieri, a neighbourhood lawyer who acts as a chorus and who knows from the start that the story will end in blood. Eddie Carbone, a hard-working dock labourer, lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine, whom they have raised.
In June 1933, deep in the Depression, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act. Its first title authorized the President to approve codes of fair competition for trades and industries, usually drafted by trade associations, and made violation of an approved code a federal misdemeanor.
The petitioner, Aaron, was a managerial employee of E. L. Aaron & Co., a New York broker-dealer that made a market in the stock of Lawn-A-Mat Chemical & Equipment Corp., a seller of lawn-care franchises. He supervised the firm's salesmen and kept its due diligence files.
A Pennsylvania statute required that at least ten verses of the Holy Bible be read, without comment, at the opening of each public school day. At Abington Senior High School, outside Philadelphia, the verses were broadcast over the public-address system each morning and followed by the Lord's Prayer, recited in unison.
Across Five Aprils follows the Creighton family of Jasper County in southern Illinois through the Civil War, from April 1861 to April 1865, as seen by the youngest son, Jethro, who is nine when the story opens. The family farm is worked by Matt and Ellen Creighton and their grown and growing children: John, a married son with a family of his own nearby; Bill, thoughtful and gentle, the brother Jethro loves best; Tom, eager for adventure; Jenny, close to Jethro in spirit; and their cousin Eb Carron, raised in the household.
Frank O'Neal Addington had been hospitalized in Texas state mental hospitals many times between 1969 and 1975. In December 1975, after he was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of assault by threat against his mother, she petitioned for his indefinite commitment.
Aesop's Fables are short animal tales that turn ordinary encounters—a wolf and a lamb, a lion and a mouse, ants and a grasshopper—into clear morals about justice, prudence, gratitude, and folly. The Greek slave Aesop is the traditional name attached to a body of stories that circulated orally and in later collections; what survives for English readers is a tradition of brief narratives ending in a pointed lesson.
On a hot summer afternoon Alice, bored beside her sister on a riverbank, sees a White Rabbit in a waistcoat take a watch out of its pocket and hurry down a rabbit-hole. She follows, falls slowly down a long well past cupboards and bookshelves, and lands in a hall of locked doors.
Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Animal Farm is a short beast fable about a revolution that turns into a tyranny. On Manor Farm near Willingdon in England, the old prize boar Major gathers the animals one night and describes a dream of a world without Man, who takes their milk, eggs and labour and sends them to the knacker when they are old.
Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England was published in London in November 1644, deliberately without a licence, a printer's name or registration with the Stationers' Company. It is written as an oration addressed to the Lords and Commons, though it was never delivered.
In the 1990s scientists at Myriad Genetics, a Salt Lake City company, determined the location and nucleotide sequence of two human genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Certain mutations in these genes greatly raise a woman's risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and knowledge of the sequences allowed Myriad to build tests that detect those mutations.
On 18 September 1895 the Cotton States and International Exposition opened in Atlanta, a fair meant to display the industrial recovery of the South thirty years after the Civil War. Its organizers, who had included a Negro Building among the exhibits, invited Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute, to speak at the opening ceremonies.
Tennessee's constitution required the General Assembly to reapportion its seats every ten years according to the number of qualified voters in each county. The legislature did so each decade from 1871 to 1901, then stopped.
John Barron and John Craig owned a profitable wharf on the eastern side of Baltimore harbor, where deep water had let large ships tie up and unload. In the course of paving streets and regrading the town, the city of Baltimore turned the courses of several streams, which then carried sand and earth down into the harbor and left the water at the wharf too shallow for most vessels.
Basic Incorporated, a maker of chemical refractories for the steel industry, had long attracted the interest of Combustion Engineering, Inc. Beginning in September 1976, Combustion's representatives met and spoke with Basic's officers and directors about a possible merger.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
Bleak House is built around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an endless lawsuit over a disputed will in the Court of Chancery, and around a secret that links a great lady to an orphan girl. Dickens tells it in two voices: an unnamed narrator in the present tense who surveys London's fog, the lawcourts, fashionable society and the slum called Tom-all-Alone's, and Esther Summerson, who writes her own story modestly in the past tense.
Maudsley's Body and Mind argues that mental life cannot be separated from bodily organization, nervous function, heredity, and disease. Based on the Gulstonian Lectures, the book brings Victorian psychiatry, physiology, and evolutionary thought into one frame.
Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer is a full-length popular biography of the German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), written for a general Christian readership. It begins with the large, cultured Bonhoeffer family of Breslau and Berlin: his father Karl, a leading professor of psychiatry and neurology; his devout mother Paula, who schooled her children at home in their early years; his twin sister Sabine; and the death of his brother Walter in the First World War, which marked the family deeply.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, decided on 17 May 1954, held that state laws requiring or permitting separate public schools for black and white children deny the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
This record concerns compulsory sterilization and is best read with a teacher's guidance. In March 1924 Virginia enacted a statute permitting the superintendents of certain state institutions to have inmates sterilized if, after a hearing, they were found to be afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity or what the law called imbecility.
Sallust wrote two short monographs on episodes of the late Roman Republic, each opened by a philosophical preface and each meant to show how ambition and greed were corrupting the state. The library text is the Rev. John Selby Watson's literal English version, with his argument (chapter outline) before each work and his explanatory notes after it.
Centesimus Annus marks the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and reads the social question through the upheavals of the twentieth century. John Paul II returns first to 1891: industrial labor, socialist agitation, private property, wages, association, and the rights of workers.
In 1785 the Massachusetts legislature incorporated the Proprietors of the Charles River Bridge to span the river between Boston and Charlestown, where Harvard College had held a ferry right since 1650. The charter let the proprietors collect tolls for forty years and required them to pay the college two hundred pounds a year for the loss of its ferry; in 1792, when a second bridge to Cambridge was authorized, the term was lengthened to seventy years.
Vincent Chiarella worked as a markup man in the New York composing room of Pandick Press, a financial printer. In 1975 and 1976 he handled five announcements of corporate takeover bids.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, published at Oxford by the Clarendon Press in four volumes between 1765 and 1769, grew out of the lectures he gave at Oxford from 1753 and as first Vinerian Professor from 1758. It was the first full account of English law written for educated readers rather than for practising lawyers, arranged as a reasoned system instead of a collection of cases.
This Paine anthology gathers the pamphlets that made revolutionary argument feel urgent, portable, and democratic. Common Sense, published in January 1776, attacks monarchy, hereditary succession, reconciliation with Britain, and political hesitation.
Considerations on Representative Government, published in London in 1861, is John Stuart Mill's full treatment of how a free people should be governed. Written in the years of debate over a second Reform Act, it gathers ideas Mill had developed in Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859) and in his reading of Thomas Hare's scheme of proportional representation.
Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, as he murders the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta while testing an idea about extraordinary persons who may step over ordinary law. Dostoevsky makes the crime happen early, so the central drama becomes not detection alone but the decomposition of Raskolnikov's theory inside his body, mind, and relationships.
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, published at Riga in 1788, is the second of his three Critiques. Where the first Critique limited what reason can know about God, freedom and the soul, this book argues that pure reason is practical by itself: it can determine the will without any help from desire, and in doing so it gives freedom, God and immortality a secure footing as matters of rational belief.
On the night of 11 January 1983 Nancy Beth Cruzan, a young Missouri woman, lost control of her car on a county road in Jasper County. Paramedics restored her breathing and heartbeat, but she never regained consciousness, and the trial court later found her to be in a persistent vegetative state, kept alive by a surgically implanted feeding tube in a state hospital.
De Monarchia is Dante's Latin treatise on universal temporal government, written in exile and generally dated between Henry VII's expedition into Italy (1310-1313) and the years when Dante was finishing the Paradiso. In three books it asks three questions: whether a single temporal monarchy is necessary for the well-being of the world, whether the Roman people acquired the office of empire by right, and whether the emperor's authority comes directly from God or through the pope.
De Regno is Aquinas's unfinished treatise on kingship, addressed to the king of Cyprus and concerned with why political rule exists, how it can serve the common good, and how it can decay into tyranny. Aquinas begins from the social nature of human beings.
Tuke describes the York Retreat, a Quaker institution founded after scandals in local madhouse care, as an alternative to fear, neglect, and routine coercion. The book gives the Retreat a history, an architecture, a daily rhythm, and a theory of treatment.
In 1972 Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, a microbiologist working for the General Electric Company, applied for a patent on a bacterium of the genus Pseudomonas into which he had introduced plasmids, hereditary units outside the chromosome, that allowed it to break down several components of crude oil. No natural bacterium had this combined capacity.
Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious freedom, argues that the human person has a right not to be coerced by individuals, groups, or the state in religious matters. The document grounds that right in dignity, conscience, and the nature of truth, while insisting that the right concerns immunity from coercion rather than indifference about religious truth.
In March 1973 Raymond Dirks, an officer of a New York broker-dealer who analyzed insurance company securities for institutional investors, received a call from Ronald Secrist, a former officer of Equity Funding Corporation of America. Secrist said that the company's assets were vastly overstated through fraud, that regulators had ignored similar warnings, and that Dirks should verify the charges and make them public.
The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's answer to a prize question set by the Academy of Dijon in 1753: what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law? Rousseau's essay did not win the prize, but it was printed at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey in 1755 with a dedication to the Republic of Geneva, a preface and extensive notes.
The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is a short essay asking one question with unusual persistence: how can so many men, cities and nations put up with a single tyrant, who has no power except what they give him? La Boétie, writing as a young law student around 1548 (some scholars date it to about 1552-53), addresses the question to a friend named Longa and answers it in stages.
The Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius are Niccolò Machiavelli's long commentary on the first ten books of Livy's history of Rome, which run from the founding of the city to the Samnite wars of the early third century BC. Machiavelli wrote them in the years after 1513, when he had been dismissed from the service of the Florentine Republic, and discussed them with young friends in the Rucellai gardens in Florence; he dedicated them to two of those friends, Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, explaining that he had chosen men who deserved to be princes rather than men who were.
District of Columbia v. Heller, decided on 26 June 2008, was the Court's first full examination of the meaning of the Second Amendment.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization arose from Mississippi's Gestational Age Act of 2018, which generally prohibited abortion after the fifteenth week of pregnancy, with exceptions for medical emergencies and severe fetal abnormality.
Dred Scott was held as a slave by Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon who took him in the 1830s to the free state of Illinois and then to Fort Snelling, in a part of the Wisconsin Territory where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 forbade slavery. There Scott married Harriet Robinson, and the family later returned to Missouri.
Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses is an anthology concept rather than one single-author book: it gathers public religious speech from Black Christian leaders before 1950, using only public-domain sermons, convention addresses, ordination sermons, and printed appeals. Its center is the Black church as pulpit, school, refuge, protest platform, mutual-aid network, and political institution.
In 1951 the New York State Board of Regents, which supervises the state's public schools, published a Statement on Moral and Spiritual Training that included a short prayer of twenty-two words: Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country. The Regents recommended it for daily use.
Ernst & Ernst, an accounting firm, audited First Securities Company of Chicago, a small brokerage house, from 1946 through 1967 and prepared the annual reports the firm filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Leston B. Nay, the brokerage's president and owner of 92 percent of its stock, persuaded certain customers to put money into special escrow accounts that he said would pay a high return.
David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political first appeared anonymously in Edinburgh in two volumes in 1741 and 1742, after his Treatise of Human Nature had, in his own phrase, fallen dead-born from the press. Written in the manner of Addison's Spectator for a polite reading public, they brought the philosophy of the Treatise to bear on British politics, religion, taste and manners.
Evangelium Vitae is John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the dignity and inviolability of human life. It opens with biblical meditation, especially the story of Cain and Abel, and then develops a moral analysis of what the pope calls threats to life in modern law, medicine, family life, and political culture.
A New Jersey statute authorized local school boards to arrange for the transportation of children to and from school, including private schools not operated for profit. The Board of Education of Ewing Township, which had no high schools of its own, adopted a resolution reimbursing parents for fares their children paid on regular public buses to attend public schools and Catholic parochial schools in nearby Trenton and Pennington.
Lambdin P. Milligan was an Indiana lawyer and Democrat who opposed the war policies of the Lincoln administration. On 5 October 1864, during the presidential campaign, he was arrested at his home by order of General Alvin P. Hovey, commander of the military district of Indiana, and accused of joining a secret society that planned to free Confederate prisoners and seize federal arsenals.
Washington's Farewell Address and selected letters present leadership as restraint, reputation, and institutional precedent. The Farewell Address, published in 1796 near the end of his presidency, warns against sectional division, party spirit, foreign entanglement, public debt, and attacks on constitutional authority.
Thomas Jefferson delivered his First Inaugural Address on 4 March 1801 in the Senate chamber of the unfinished Capitol, the first presidential inauguration held in the new federal city of Washington. Chief Justice John Marshall administered the oath.
The First Oration Against Catiline is the speech Cicero, as consul, delivered to the Roman senate on 8 November 63 BC in the temple of Jupiter Stator, with Lucius Sergius Catilina himself sitting among the senators. Catiline, twice defeated for the consulship and deep in debt, had been organizing a rising: his ally Gaius Manlius was raising an army in Etruria, and on the night of 6-7 November conspirators met at the house of Marcus Laeca, where two men undertook to murder Cicero at his morning reception.
In January 1795 the Georgia legislature sold roughly thirty-five million acres of its western lands, much of present Alabama and Mississippi, to four land companies for $500,000. It soon emerged that nearly every legislator who voted for the sale had been promised shares or money by the purchasers.
Freedom and the Law is a short book of legal and political philosophy by the Italian jurist Bruno Leoni, based on lectures he gave at Claremont Men's College in California in 1958 at a summer institute on freedom and competitive enterprise. It was published in English in 1961 by D. Van Nostrand in the William Volker Fund series in the humane studies.
After Robert Fulton's steamboat made its run up the Hudson in 1807, the New York legislature confirmed and extended an exclusive right, held by Fulton and Robert R. Livingston, to navigate all state waters with vessels propelled by steam. Anyone else needed their license.
In June 1961 someone broke into the Bay Harbor Poolroom in Panama City, Florida, and took coins from a cigarette machine and a jukebox. Clarence Earl Gideon, a fifty-one-year-old drifter with a record of earlier convictions, was charged with breaking and entering with intent to commit a misdemeanor, a felony under Florida law.
In 1902, after the assassination of President McKinley by an avowed anarchist, New York made it a felony to advocate, by speech or writing, the doctrine that organized government should be overthrown by force, violence or any unlawful means. In June 1919 the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party held a national conference in New York City, and its National Council, of which Benjamin Gitlow was a member, issued a Left Wing Manifesto.
On 23 March 1775 the Second Virginia Convention, meeting in St. John's Church in Richmond to stay clear of the royal governor at Williamsburg, debated Patrick Henry's resolutions to put the colony into a posture of defense by forming and arming a militia. Several respected delegates had urged patience while petitions to the king were pending.
In 1996 California voters approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, which exempted from state prosecution seriously ill patients and their caregivers who possessed or grew marijuana for medical use on a physician's recommendation. Angel Raich and Diane Monson, two California residents with serious medical conditions, used marijuana on the advice of their doctors.
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is John Bunyan's account of his own conversion, written in the Bedford county jail and first published in 1666. It is told in 339 numbered paragraphs, opened by a preface addressed to the members of his congregation, whom he calls his children in the faith, and to whom he sends what he calls honey taken from the carcase of a lion.
Because it concerns contraception and marriage, the case is best studied with a teacher's guidance. Since 1879 Connecticut law had made it a crime for any person to use a drug or device to prevent conception, and a general accessory statute allowed anyone who assisted or counseled such use to be punished as a principal.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
This anthology gathers three state papers that Alexander Hamilton wrote during his first two years as Secretary of the Treasury. On 21 September 1789 the House of Representatives asked him for a plan to support the public credit.
Robert Y. Hayne's speech on Foot's resolution is the South Carolina side of the Webster-Hayne debate, the most celebrated exchange in the history of the United States Senate. In December 1829 Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut proposed an inquiry into limiting the sale of public lands in the West.
The Social Security Act of 1935 created, among other programs, a national system of old-age benefits. Title VIII levied an excise on employers and an income tax on employees, both measured by wages and paid into the Treasury like other revenue.
Henry V follows the young King Henry, once the tavern-haunting Prince Hal, as he leads England to war with France and wins the battle of Agincourt in 1415. A Chorus opens each act, asking the audience to let their imaginations fill the small wooden theatre with the vasty fields of France.
To pay for the Civil War, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act of 25 February 1862, which authorized paper United States notes, soon called greenbacks, and declared them lawful money and a legal tender for all debts public and private. The notes were not redeemable in gold on demand, and they quickly traded below coin.
Homilies on the Statues records Chrysostom preaching to Antioch during a civic emergency in 387. After unpopular imperial taxes provoked unrest, a crowd in Antioch insulted and damaged statues of Emperor Theodosius and his family.
On the evening of 16 June 1858 the Illinois Republican state convention, meeting in the Hall of Representatives of the State House at Springfield, resolved that Abraham Lincoln was its first and only choice for the United States Senate against the Democratic incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln answered with a carefully written acceptance speech that opened the campaign and set its terms.
I Am Prepared to Die is Nelson Mandela's statement from the dock during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Facing charges that could lead to death, Mandela uses the courtroom not primarily to plead for mercy but to explain the political history and moral logic of resistance to apartheid.
Martin Luther King Jr. gave this address on 28 August 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, near the end of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march, led by A. Philip Randolph and organized chiefly by Bayard Rustin, drew roughly a quarter of a million people to the Mall to press for civil rights legislation then before Congress and for economic opportunity.
John F. Kennedy took the oath of office from Chief Justice Earl Warren on the east front of the Capitol at noon on 20 January 1961, the morning after a heavy snowfall, in bitter cold. Robert Frost had just recited The Gift Outright from memory when glare kept him from reading the poem he had written for the day.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is Harriet Jacobs's account of her life in slavery and escape, told under the name Linda Brent with the names of people and places changed. Linda grows up in a North Carolina town believing herself free until, at six, her mother dies and she learns she is a slave.
Institutes of the Christian Religion is John Calvin's ordered account of Christian doctrine, written to train readers in godliness and to show the King of France what his persecuted evangelical subjects actually believed. The library text opens with the Prefatory Address to Francis I, which pleads that the Reformers teach nothing new but the faith of Scripture and the early fathers, and with Calvin's Epistle to the Reader, dated Geneva, 1 August 1559, in which he says he was never satisfied until the work was set in its present order.
This volume completes the library's surviving plays of Euripides with eleven works in Edward P. Coleridge's prose translation of 1891. Iphigenia in Aulis, produced after the poet's death in 405 BC, opens at night on the shore of Aulis, where the Greek fleet is held back by windless weather.
Ivanhoe is set in England in 1194, when King Richard the Lion-Hearted is making his way home in secret after captivity in Austria and his brother Prince John is scheming to take the crown. More than a century after the Norman Conquest, Saxons and Normans are still bitterly divided.
A Massachusetts statute authorized the board of health of any city or town to require the vaccination of its inhabitants when it judged that necessary for public health or safety, and provided a five-dollar penalty for adults who refused; children certified by a physician as unfit for vaccination were exempt. In February 1902, during a smallpox outbreak, the Cambridge board of health ordered all inhabitants who had not been vaccinated since 1897 to be vaccinated, and offered vaccination without charge.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
David McCullough's John Adams is a full narrative biography of the second president of the United States, built largely on the Adams family papers and especially on the letters between John and Abigail Adams. It follows Adams from his boyhood on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1735, through Harvard College, schoolteaching in Worcester and the law, to his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith, whom McCullough presents as his closest adviser and equal partner.
Johnny Tremain follows a Boston apprentice from the summer of 1773 to the first day of the American Revolution in April 1775. Johnny, fourteen, is the most gifted of the three apprentices in the silversmith shop of old Ephraim Lapham, a pious man who warns him about pride by having him read Leviticus 26:19; the next two chapters take their titles from that verse.
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's tragedy of the assassination of 44 BC, begins as Rome celebrates Caesar's triumph over the sons of Pompey. The tribunes rebuke the fickle crowd, a soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March, and Caesar is offered a crown three times by Mark Antony and refuses it, then falls in a fit of the falling sickness.
Kidnapped is narrated by David Balfour, a seventeen-year-old Lowland Scot who in June 1751, after his father's death, leaves the village of Essendean with a letter for the House of Shaws. The minister Mr. Campbell sends him off with a shilling, a Bible and a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, and with the news that he is a Balfour of Shaws.
King Lear begins with a political and familial error: Lear divides Britain according to a public love test, accepts the fluent flattery of Goneril and Regan, rejects Cordelia's plain truth, and banishes Kent for trying to correct him. The abdication leaves Lear with the name of king but without the substance of rule, and the tragedy strips away retinue, shelter, authority, sanity, and finally family.
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, decided on 18 December 1944, upheld the criminal conviction of an American citizen for remaining in his home area after the Army ordered all persons of Japanese ancestry to leave it.
The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue, twelve books of conversation in which three elderly men design the constitution and legal code of a new city. On a midsummer day an unnamed Athenian Stranger walks from Knossos toward the cave and shrine of Zeus with Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan.
Lectures on Calvinism are the six Stone Lectures that the Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper delivered at Princeton Theological Seminary in October 1898, during a visit to the United States. Kuyper's aim was to present Calvinism not as a narrow church party or a set of doctrines about predestination but as a complete life-system, a view of the world able to shape every area of human life, comparable in scope to paganism, Islam, Roman Catholicism and the modernism that he saw spreading from the French Revolution of 1789.
Lectures on Revivals of Religion is Finney's manual of revival as method. Where Edwards treats awakening as a surprising work to be interpreted cautiously, Finney argues that revivals are not miracles in the sense of being beyond means.
In Hepburn v. Griswold (February 1870) a divided Court had held that the Legal Tender Act of 1862 could not make paper United States notes a legal tender for debts incurred before the act.
By the late 1960s Catholic parochial schools educated a large share of children in states such as Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and rising lay-teacher salaries strained their budgets. Pennsylvania's Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1968 authorized the state to purchase secular educational services from private schools, reimbursing teachers' salaries, textbooks and materials for courses in mathematics, modern foreign languages, physical science and physical education, with state approval of materials and audited accounts.
Les Misérables follows the convict Jean Valjean from his release in 1815 to his death in 1833, and through him a whole society of the poor, the lawful and the rebellious in Restoration and July Monarchy France. Valjean has served nineteen years in the galleys at Toulon, five for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's hungry children and the rest for attempts to escape.
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania is a series of twelve public letters that John Dickinson printed in the Pennsylvania Chronicle beginning with the issue of November 30–December 3, 1767, and continuing weekly into February 1768. Writing as a modest farmer settled near the Delaware River, a man of small estate, a good library and a contented mind, Dickinson addressed his countrymen in the British colonies about the measures Parliament had passed in 1767 under Charles Townshend.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince is Samuel Rutherford's answer, printed in London in October 1644, to Sacro-sancta Regum Majestas, a defence of royal absolutism by John Maxwell, the deposed bishop of Ross whom the Glasgow Assembly of 1638 had excommunicated. Rutherford wrote while Scotland and the English Parliament were allied against Charles I under the Solemn League and Covenant, and his long subtitle presents the book as a justification of Scotland's defensive wars and of its army's march to help its brethren in England.
Charles O. Linder was a licensed physician in Spokane, Washington, registered under the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. In April 1922 he gave a woman named Ida Casey, whom he knew to be addicted to morphine and cocaine, one tablet of morphine and three of cocaine to take herself over a period of time.
Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers is Ralph Moody's memoir of the four years, 1906 to 1910, that his family spent on a Colorado ranch, told from the point of view of the boy he was, eight years old when the story begins. His father, Charles, has a persistent cough from his work in a New Hampshire mill, and when a cousin, Phil, who sells gold stock in Denver, promises better prospects, the family leaves East Rochester for a run-down rented ranch near Fort Logan, southwest of Denver.
In 1895 New York passed the Bakeshop Act, which regulated the sanitation of bakeries and provided that no employee could be required or permitted to work in a bakery more than sixty hours a week or ten hours a day. The hours provision was carried into the state's Labor Law of 1897.
Long Walk to Freedom is Mandela's memoir of childhood, political awakening, resistance, imprisonment, negotiation, and democratic transition. It begins in rural Transkei, with family, Thembu traditions, mission schooling, and the gradual widening of Mandela's world through education and urban life.
Christopher Lowe was president and principal shareholder of Lowe Management Corporation, a registered investment adviser from 1974 to 1981. During those years he was convicted of misappropriating a client's funds, acting as an adviser without registering in New York, tampering with evidence to cover up a fraud on a client, and stealing from a bank.
Magna Carta, the "Great Charter," is the grant of liberties that King John of England sealed in the meadow of Runnymede, on the Thames between Windsor and Staines, on 15 June 1215. It was written in Latin and issued as a royal charter, but it was really a peace treaty: a large group of barons, angered by John's heavy taxation, his arbitrary fines and seizures, and his costly failed wars in France, had renounced their allegiance and taken London in May 1215.
On 23 May 1957 three Cleveland police officers came to the home of Dollree Mapp looking for a man wanted for questioning about a bombing and for gambling slips. On her lawyer's advice she refused to let them in without a search warrant.
In the final days of his administration in March 1801, President John Adams nominated, and the Senate confirmed, dozens of justices of the peace for the District of Columbia under a new organic act. William Marbury was one of them.
Congress chartered the Second Bank of the United States in 1816, five years after the charter of the first national bank, created in 1791 on Alexander Hamilton's plan, had lapsed. The new bank opened a branch in Baltimore.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is often called the first American psychiatry textbook. Benjamin Rush gathers observations, classifications, causes, and treatments for mania, melancholy, hypochondria, derangement, moral faculties, memory, and related conditions.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention show him as both principled advocate and institutional anatomist. Memorial and Remonstrance, written in 1785 against a Virginia religious assessment bill, argues that religion must be free from state coercion because conscience is prior to civil society and cannot be surrendered to government.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
Mere Christianity is C. S. Lewis's case for, and plain explanation of, the beliefs held in common by Christians of most denominations. In the preface Lewis borrows the phrase "mere Christianity" from the Puritan writer Richard Baxter and compares the shared faith to a hall from which doors open into the rooms of the separate churches; he says he is describing the hall, not recommending a room, and that people must eventually live in a room rather than in the hall.
In April 1919, months after the armistice ending the First World War, Nebraska enacted a statute forbidding any teacher in a private, parochial or public school to teach any subject in a language other than English, and forbidding instruction in foreign languages as such until a pupil had passed the eighth grade. Iowa, Ohio and other states passed similar measures.
Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, decided on 3 June 1940, asked whether a Pennsylvania public school could expel children who refused, on religious grounds, to salute the American flag.
On 13 March 1963 Phoenix police arrested Ernesto Miranda at his home in connection with a kidnapping and sexual assault. After the victim identified him, two officers questioned him in Interrogation Room No. 2 for about two hours.
After the Civil War, Chicago became the greatest grain market in the world. Wheat and corn from the prairie states arrived by rail and were lifted by steam-powered elevators into enormous warehouses before shipment east.
My Father's Dragon is told by a narrator about the boyhood adventure of their father, Elmer Elevator. One cold rainy day Elmer brings home a drippy old alley cat; his mother hates cats, whips him when she finds the saucer in the cellar, and throws the cat out.
This Douglass entry pairs the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with the 1852 speech commonly known as What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? The Narrative tells Douglass's movement from enslaved childhood in Maryland through violence, literacy, skilled labor, resistance, escape, and public abolitionist identity.
In March 2010 Congress passed and President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Two provisions drew constitutional challenge.
In 1925 Minnesota enacted a Public Nuisance Law allowing a court to abate, as a public nuisance, any business of regularly publishing an obscene, lewd and lascivious or a malicious, scandalous and defamatory newspaper or periodical. Truth published with good motives and for justifiable ends was a defense.
On 29 March 1960 the New York Times printed a full-page advertisement titled Heed Their Rising Voices. Paid for by the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, it described student demonstrations, accused unnamed Southern violators of meeting Dr. King's peaceful protests with intimidation, and asked for money.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, often called the Wagner Act after Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, guaranteed employees the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, defined unfair labor practices by employers, and created a National Labor Relations Board to enforce it. Congress grounded the act in its power over interstate commerce, finding that refusals to bargain led to strikes that obstructed the flow of goods.
No Exit and Three Other Plays is an American collection of four of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays from the years of the German occupation and just after it, in which his philosophy of freedom and responsibility is worked out on the stage. Stuart Gilbert translated No Exit and The Flies, and Lionel Abel translated Dirty Hands and The Respectful Prostitute.
No Treason is a series of pamphlets that Lysander Spooner, a Boston lawyer and long-time abolitionist, published at his own expense after the Civil War. He planned a longer series but issued only three numbers, No. I and No. II in 1867 and No. VI, The Constitution of No Authority, in 1870; Nos.
For decades American bonds and mortgages had commonly promised payment in gold coin of the present standard of weight and fineness, a clause designed to protect lenders if the paper dollar lost value. In the banking crisis of 1933 the Roosevelt administration took the country off the gold standard: it required the surrender of gold coin, forbade its export, and, by a joint resolution of Congress on 5 June 1933, declared gold clauses against public policy and made every such obligation dischargeable dollar for dollar in any legal tender.
In January 1957 Kenneth Donaldson was committed to the Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee after his father sought a hearing before a Pinellas County judge, who found him mentally ill. He remained there against his will for nearly fifteen years.
Obergefell v. Hodges, decided on 26 June 2015, asked whether the Fourteenth Amendment requires a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex, and to recognize such a marriage lawfully performed in another state.
Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is Richard Hooker's defence of the order of the Church of England as settled under Elizabeth I, written against the Puritan party that wished to replace government by bishops with the presbyterian discipline practised at Geneva. The library text contains the Preface and Book I, the opening portion of a work in eight books; the Everyman printing it comes from also includes editorial footnotes, a few of which remain in this OCR text, while that printing's modern introduction is omitted.
Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, follows an orphan from a workhouse cradle to a safe home, passing on the way through the criminal underworld of 1830s London. Oliver is born in a workhouse in an unnamed town; his mother dies within minutes, leaving only a locket and a ring that later prove who she was.
The two respondents, identified in the case as L. C. and E. W., were Georgia women with intellectual disabilities who also had psychiatric diagnoses, schizophrenia in one case and a personality disorder in the other. Both were voluntarily admitted to Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta.
On Duties is Cicero's last philosophical work, written in the autumn of 44 BC, in the months after the murder of Julius Caesar, and addressed as a letter in three books to his son Marcus, then studying philosophy at Athens under the Peripatetic Cratippus. Cicero follows, with freedom, the Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes, whose treatise on duty (kathēkon, Latin officium) he adapts for a Roman reader, adding examples from Roman history and from his own career.
On Liberty asks what limits there are on the power society may legitimately exercise over the individual. Mill opens by observing that the old struggle between subjects and rulers has been transformed by democracy.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich follows a single winter day, from reveille at five in the morning to lights-out, in a Soviet special labour camp on the steppe of Kazakhstan in the early 1950s. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a peasant from the village of Temgenyovo, was captured by the Germans in 1942, escaped back to his own lines, and was charged with treason as a supposed German spy; he signed a confession because refusing meant being shot.
Patriarcha: or the Natural Power of Kings is Sir Robert Filmer's defence of royal authority as the natural continuation of the authority of fathers. Written in manuscript during the reign of Charles I and circulated privately, it was printed in London in 1680, almost thirty years after Filmer's death, when supporters of the crown were resisting attempts in Parliament to bar the Catholic Duke of York from the succession.
Pax Romana asks what the famous Roman peace actually was, how it was created, and how it was kept. Adrian Goldsworthy's answer begins with conquest.
On Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, Japanese carrier aircraft struck the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, damaging or sinking all eight battleships in the harbor, destroying much of the aircraft on the island, and killing more than 2,400 Americans. That evening Roosevelt dictated a short draft to his secretary Grace Tully and then revised it by hand.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
Pericles' Funeral Oration is the speech that the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered in the winter of 431/430 BC at the public burial of the citizens who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. It survives only in the History of Thucydides, who heard Pericles speak and who says of the speeches in his work that he kept as close as he could to the general sense of what was actually said.
Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden) is a short philosophical essay by Immanuel Kant, published at Königsberg in 1795, a few months after Prussia made a separate peace with revolutionary France at Basel. Kant cast it, with a touch of irony, in the form of a peace treaty.
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) was written as a textbook for his Berlin lectures on law, ethics and the state. Its preface is dated June 1820, and the book appeared in Berlin late that year with 1821 on the title page.
On 7 November 1922 Oregon voters adopted by initiative a Compulsory Education Act requiring every parent or guardian of a child between eight and sixteen to send the child to a public school, with narrow exceptions, beginning in September 1926. The measure was promoted by the Scottish Rite Masons and supported by the Ku Klux Klan, and Walter M. Pierce, elected governor the same day, endorsed it.
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey tested five provisions of Pennsylvania's Abortion Control Act of 1982, as amended in 1988 and 1989.
In 1890 Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, requiring railways to provide "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" and making it a crime for a passenger to sit in a coach assigned to the other race. A group of New Orleans citizens of color, the Comité des Citoyens, organized a test case.
In May 1975 the Texas Legislature amended Section 21.031 of its Education Code to withhold state funds for educating children who had not been legally admitted to the United States and to allow local districts to deny them enrollment. In 1977 the Tyler Independent School District in Smith County began charging such children tuition.
Politics examines the polis as the community ordered toward living well. Aristotle begins with the household, including relations of master and slave, husband and wife, parent and child, and then argues that the city exists by nature because human beings possess speech about justice and advantage.
The Wilson Tariff Act of 28 August 1894, which became law without President Cleveland's signature, lowered tariff rates and imposed a two percent tax on incomes above $4,000 a year, including rents, interest, dividends and business profits, for the years 1895 through 1899. Charles Pollock, a shareholder of the Farmers' Loan and Trust Company of New York, sued to stop the company from paying the tax, a form of suit that allowed the question to reach the courts before collection.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a medico-forensic taxonomy of sexual behavior written for physicians and lawyers. Krafft-Ebing organizes case histories under categories such as hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, paraesthesia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual feeling, using the language of degeneration, neuropathic heredity, and criminal responsibility.
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in London in November 1790, is cast as a long letter to a young Frenchman, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who had asked Burke's opinion of events in Paris. Its immediate occasion was the sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, preached by the Dissenting minister Richard Price on 4 November 1789 to the Revolution Society at the meeting-house in the Old Jewry, and the society's address of congratulation to the French National Assembly.
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is a historical study, first given as the Henry Scott Holland Memorial Lectures in 1922, of how Christian thought about economic life changed between the late Middle Ages and the early eighteenth century. Tawney's question is how a society that once judged trade, lending and prices by moral and religious standards came to treat economic activity as a self-governing realm ruled by impersonal laws.
Rerum Novarum, issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891 and addressed to the bishops of the Catholic world, takes its Latin title from its opening words about the spirit of revolutionary change. Its English title is On the Condition of the Working Classes.
The Farmers Cooperative of Arkansas and Oklahoma, an agricultural cooperative with about 23,000 members, raised money for its general operations by selling promissory notes payable on demand. The notes were uncollateralized and uninsured but paid a variable interest rate set monthly to stay above what local banks paid.
In 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, making it a crime in the federal territories to marry a second spouse while the first was living. The law was aimed at plural marriage as taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah Territory, but was seldom enforced for a decade.
Richard III follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV, from his first soliloquy to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Wars of the Roses are over and peace has come, but Richard, born misshapen and unfit for courtship, tells the audience he has determined to prove a villain and win the crown.
Section 11721 of California's Health and Safety Code made it a misdemeanor, punishable by at least ninety days in the county jail, for any person to use narcotics or to be addicted to their use. Lawrence Robinson was stopped on a Los Angeles street; two officers testified that they had seen marks on his arms and that he admitted occasional use.
Roe v. Wade came to the Court from Texas, where statutes dating in substance from 1857 made it a crime to procure an abortion except on medical advice to save the mother's life.
Saint Joan is Shaw's chronicle play in six scenes and an epilogue about Joan of Arc, the peasant girl from Domrémy who led the French against the English in the Hundred Years' War. In Scene I, set in 1429 at the castle of Vaucouleurs, the blustering squire Robert de Baudricourt is talked by Joan, and by his own officer Poulengey, into giving her a horse and an escort to the Dauphin; when she leaves, the hens that had stopped laying begin again.
Texas financed its public schools through a Minimum Foundation Program that combined state money with a required local share, and allowed each district to raise more by taxing property within its borders. Because property values differed widely, so did spending.
The United States entered the First World War in April 1917. In May Congress passed the Selective Service Act, providing for conscription, and in June the Espionage Act, which made it a crime during wartime to cause or attempt to cause insubordination in the armed forces or to obstruct recruiting or enlistment.
Capital Gains Research Bureau, Inc., and its principal, Harry P. Schwarzmann, published a monthly investment newsletter, the Capital Gains Report, mailed to about five thousand subscribers at eighteen dollars a year. Between March and November 1960, on six occasions, the firm bought shares of a stock shortly before recommending it in the Report for long-term investment.
Charles Edwards was chairman, chief executive and sole shareholder of ETS Payphones, Inc. Through independent distributors ETS sold payphones to the public for about $7,000 each, packaged with a site lease, a five-year leaseback and management agreement, and a promise to buy the phone back at full price at the end of the lease or within 180 days of a request.
The W. J. Howey Company owned large citrus groves in Lake County, Florida, near a resort hotel it also operated. Each year it planted about five hundred acres, kept half and sold the rest to the public in narrow strips, explaining that the sales helped finance further planting.
Abraham Lincoln took the oath for his second term on 4 March 1865 on the East Portico of the Capitol, under a newly finished dome, before a crowd standing in mud after a morning of rain. The war was nearly won: Sherman had marched through Georgia and the Carolinas, Grant held Lee at Petersburg, and Congress had sent the Thirteenth Amendment to the states five weeks earlier.
Daniel Webster's Second Reply to Hayne was delivered in the United States Senate on 26 and 27 January 1830, during a debate that began with a modest resolution from Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut about limiting the sale of public lands in the West. Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina had turned the debate into an attack on New England, accusing it of selfishness toward the West and of disloyalty during the War of 1812, and had defended the doctrine, associated with Vice President John C. Calhoun, who was presiding, that a state may declare a federal law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
The Second Treatise, subtitled 'An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government', is the constructive half of Locke's Two Treatises. The First Treatise demolishes Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which derived the absolute power of kings from Adam's fatherly dominion.
Latimer's Selected Sermons bring the English Reformation into a rough, vivid, public idiom. Unlike a systematic theologian, Latimer often sounds like a moral witness standing before court and commons at once.
Calvin's Selected Sermons present the Reformation as disciplined exposition rather than only protest. Preaching in Geneva, Calvin moved sequentially through biblical books, applying Scripture to doctrine, worship, civic life, household conduct, suffering, and church reform.
Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail brings together Martin Luther King Jr.'s public theology and civil-rights argument at their most concentrated. The sermon tradition behind King includes the Black church, biblical prophecy, social gospel, liberal theology, and the cadences of African American sacred speech.
Shane is a short Western novel in sixteen chapters, told years afterward by Bob Starrett, who was about eleven in the summer of 1889 when a stranger rode into his family's Wyoming valley. The rider, dressed in dark, fine clothes and calling himself only Shane, stops at the homestead of Joe Starrett, Bob's father, and Joe's wife, Marian.
From 1980 to 1982 Eugene and Julia McMahon, for themselves and as trustees of pension and profit-sharing plans, held accounts with the brokerage firm Shearson/American Express Inc. Julia McMahon signed two customer agreements providing that any controversy over the accounts would be settled by arbitration.
Silas Marner is George Eliot's short novel of a lonely linen-weaver restored to human fellowship by a child. In his youth Silas belonged to a strict dissenting congregation at Lantern Yard in a northern manufacturing town, where he was respected for his piety and for the cataleptic fits the brethren took for spiritual visitations.
In March 1869 the Louisiana legislature passed an act entitled "An act to protect the health of the city of New Orleans," which chartered the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company and gave it for twenty-five years the sole right to maintain stock landings and slaughterhouses in the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard. Every butcher in that district of over a thousand square miles had to bring his animals to the company's slaughterhouse below the city and pay its fees.
These three Senate speeches were the central statements in the long debate of 1850 over the lands won from Mexico, and the last great addresses of the three statesmen of their generation. The Mexican War had added California and the Southwest.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive. Becket's political story is familiar: the brilliant royal chancellor becomes archbishop of Canterbury, clashes with Henry II over ecclesiastical liberty and royal jurisdiction, goes into exile, returns under tense compromise, and is killed in the cathedral on 29 December 1170 by knights acting in the atmosphere of the king's fury.
In 1870 John D. Rockefeller, his brother William, Henry M. Flagler and others organized the Standard Oil Company of Ohio to refine crude oil. Over the next decade the company acquired or allied itself with most of its competitors, and in 1882 the stockholders of some forty companies placed their shares with nine trustees, creating the Standard Oil Trust.
The Statesman (Politikos) is one of Plato's late dialogues, usually dated to the 360s or 350s BC. It continues the conversation of the Sophist, held the day before: a visitor from Elea, a follower of Parmenides, has defined the sophist, and now, at Socrates' request, he undertakes to define the statesman or king.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
In February 1946 Heman Marion Sweatt, a Houston mail carrier and a graduate of Wiley College, applied to the University of Texas Law School in Austin. The university's president, Theophilus S. Painter, refused him admission because state law reserved the university for white students, and at that time no law school in Texas admitted Black applicants.
Tales from Shakespeare retells twenty of Shakespeare's plays as prose stories for children. A short preface explains the method: the authors keep Shakespeare's own words wherever they can, avoid words that came into English after his time, and hope the tales will send young readers on to the plays themselves when they are older.
On 12 June 1987 President Ronald Reagan spoke in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, with the Berlin Wall and the closed gate directly behind his platform. The city was marking its 750th anniversary, and Reagan, on his second visit, addressed Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Governing Mayor Eberhard Diepgen, and a large crowd, while also speaking by broadcast to listeners in East Berlin and Eastern Europe.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collects the first twelve short stories about the consulting detective of 221B Baker Street, each narrated by his friend Dr. John Watson. In A Scandal in Bohemia the King of Bohemia hires Holmes to recover a compromising photograph from the singer Irene Adler; Holmes, disguised first as a groom and then as a clergyman, tricks her into revealing its hiding place, but she sees through him and escapes with her new husband, leaving Holmes the admiring loser.
The Anti-Federalist Papers are not a single coordinated book but a body of pamphlets, essays, speeches, and newspaper pieces opposing or demanding amendments to the proposed Constitution. Their writers differed among themselves, but they shared alarm about the scale and power of the new federal government.
The Arabian Nights Entertainments is Andrew Lang's 1898 selection of the Thousand and One Nights for children, retold in English from Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century French version. The frame story comes first.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were the first written frame of government for the United States. Richard Henry Lee's resolution of June 1776 asked Congress to prepare independence, foreign alliances and a plan of confederation together, and a committee chaired by John Dickinson produced a draft that summer.
The Athenian Constitution (Athenaion Politeia) is a short treatise in two parts on the government of Athens, written in the 330s or 320s BC by Aristotle or by a member of his school as one of the 158 constitutions the Lyceum is said to have collected. It was known only from quotations until a papyrus roll, copied on the back of farm accounts from Roman Egypt, was acquired by the British Museum and identified by Frederic G. Kenyon, who published the text and his translation in 1891.
The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Black Arrow is set in England during the Wars of the Roses, when York and Lancaster fought for the crown and lesser lords changed sides as fortune moved. Richard Shelton, called Dick, is the young ward of Sir Daniel Brackley, a grasping knight who holds the Moat House at Tunstall and has grown rich by seizing other men's lands.
The Book of Enoch, usually called 1 Enoch, is a collection of five Jewish apocalyptic books gathered under the name of Enoch, the patriarch of Genesis 5 who walked with God and was not, for God took him. Written in stages during the Second Temple period, it presents Enoch as a righteous scribe who is shown the secrets of heaven, earth and the coming judgment and writes them down for his son Methuselah and for a remote generation.
The Burke-Paine debate is the exchange between Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (November 1790) and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (Part I, March 1791; Part II, February 1792), the most famous controversy among the many British pamphlets provoked by the French Revolution. This entry is a guide to the debate as a whole; it has no text of its own, and the two books are in the library separately with their full texts.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Comedy of Errors takes place in a single day in the Greek city of Ephesus, where two sets of identical twins, separated as babies, are mistaken for each other until the whole town seems bewitched. Egeon, an old merchant of Syracuse, has been arrested because the two cities are at war and any Syracusan found in Ephesus must pay a thousand marks or die.
The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in London in 1656 during Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, is a model constitution for a republic set in an island called Oceana, which is England under a thin disguise. Scotland is Marpesia, Ireland Panopea, London Emporium, and Cromwell himself appears as Olphaus Megaletor, the Lord Archon or sole legislator who founds the commonwealth and then gives up his power.
The Communist Manifesto presents modern history as the history of class struggle and casts the bourgeoisie as both revolutionary and exploitative. Marx and Engels argue that capitalism has dissolved feudal relations, expanded world markets, concentrated production, remade family and nation, and subjected older loyalties to cash exchange.
Published in Munich in 1937 under the one-word title Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer's attempt to recover the plain command of Jesus to follow him from a Lutheran church that had, he believed, turned grace into a doctrine requiring nothing. Its first chapter sets the terms for the whole book with the contrast between cheap and costly grace.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Divine Comedy begins with Dante lost in a dark wood midway through life, unable to climb the sunlit hill because beasts block his way. Virgil comes as guide and leads him through Inferno, where punishments reveal the inner logic of disordered love, violence, fraud, and treachery.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
The Fall is a short novel in six chapters made up entirely of the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Frenchman living in Amsterdam, who over five days talks to a stranger he meets at a sailors' bar called Mexico City. The listener never speaks in the text; his replies are implied by Clamence's answers.
The Federalist Papers are eighty-five essays written to persuade New York voters to ratify the proposed United States Constitution. Published under the shared pseudonym Publius, they defend a stronger federal union against fears that centralized power would destroy liberty.
The Founding Documents gathers the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as one civic anthology. The Declaration, adopted by the Continental Congress in July 1776, announces separation from Britain by appealing to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to the self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, and to government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.
On 19 November 1863, four and a half months after the Union victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a large crowd gathered to dedicate the Soldiers' National Cemetery, where Union soldiers killed in the fighting of 1-3 July were being reinterred. The principal orator was Edward Everett, the former secretary of state and president of Harvard, who spoke for about two hours.
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's history of the Soviet system of prisons, labour camps and exile, which he likened to an archipelago of islands scattered across the country, visible only to those taken there. Written in secret between 1958 and 1968, it draws on Solzhenitsyn's own eight years as a prisoner and on the testimony of some two hundred and twenty-seven other former prisoners, together with published Soviet sources.
The Hiding Place is Corrie ten Boom's memoir, written with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, of her family's life in Haarlem, their work hiding Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands, and her imprisonment with her sister Betsie in Nazi prisons and camps. It opens in January 1937 with the hundredth anniversary of the watch shop in the narrow old house called the Beje, where Corrie, then in her forties and unmarried, lives with her father Casper and her older sister Betsie.
Book VI of Polybius's Histories interrupts his narrative of the Second Punic War at its darkest moment for Rome, the defeat at Cannae in 216 BC, to explain how a city that had just lost an army could recover and, within fifty-three years, bring nearly the whole known world under its power. His answer is the Roman constitution.
Books I-V are the first pentad of Livy's vast history of Rome from its foundation, carrying the story from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to the recovery of the city after the Gallic sack of about 390 BC. Livy opens with a preface that admits the earliest traditions are closer to poetry than to record, and then states his purpose: history sets before the reader examples of every kind of conduct, to be imitated or avoided, and Rome, he believes, was richer in good examples than any other state until luxury and avarice came late.
The History of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ unfinished account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 411 BCE. Unlike Herodotus’ broad storytelling, Thucydides narrows his gaze to power, fear, interest, decision and the deterioration of civic language under pressure.
The Innocence of Father Brown collects the first twelve stories about Father Brown, a short, round-faced Roman Catholic priest from Essex with a shabby umbrella and an armful of brown-paper parcels, who solves crimes by understanding the sinners who commit them. In "The Blue Cross" Aristide Valentin, head of the Paris police, lands at Harwich hunting the giant French thief Flambeau and follows a trail of absurdities across London: salt in a sugar bowl, soup thrown at a wall, a window broken and paid for in advance, price labels swapped on a fruit stall.
The Institutes of Justinian is a short official textbook of Roman law, issued at Constantinople on 21 November 533 and given the force of law, together with the Digest, from 30 December of that year. It was written for first-year law students: the preface, addressed to the youth desirous of studying the law, explains that the emperor, having reconquered Africa and set in order both the imperial constitutions and the writings of the old jurists, has commissioned Tribonian, Theophilus and Dorotheus to compose an elementary book so that beginners may learn the law as it is actually in force.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Jungle Book is a collection of seven animal stories, each followed by a song or poem. The first three tell of Mowgli, a man's cub raised by wolves in the Seeonee hills of central India.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Law (La Loi) is a pamphlet of about sixteen thousand words that Frédéric Bastiat published in Paris in 1850, during the Second Republic, when he sat in the Legislative Assembly and was dying of a disease of the throat and lungs. It is his most direct statement of the purpose and limits of law.
The Leipzig Disputation was a formal academic debate held in the great hall of the Pleissenburg, the ducal castle at Leipzig, from late June to mid-July 1519, under the patronage of Duke George of Saxony and against the wishes of the local bishop of Merseburg. It grew out of a challenge by Johann Eck of Ingolstadt, who had criticized Luther's theses on indulgences and in late 1518 published theses for debate with Andreas Karlstadt of Wittenberg, aimed in fact at Luther.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates are the seven joint debates held between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic incumbent, during the 1858 contest for a United States Senate seat from Illinois. Senators were then chosen by the state legislature, so the two men were campaigning for legislative candidates of their parties.
The Mayflower Compact is a single paragraph of about two hundred words, signed on 11 November 1620 (Old Style; 21 November by the modern calendar) aboard the ship Mayflower as it lay at anchor in the hook of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown Harbor. The ship had left Plymouth, England, in September with about a hundred passengers.
The Merchant of Venice joins two stories, a bond for a pound of flesh and a lottery of caskets, and moves between the commercial city of Venice and Belmont, the country estate of the heiress Portia. Antonio, a wealthy merchant, opens the play sad without knowing why.
Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883) gathers the Sherwood outlaw tales into one continuous prose romance for young readers: archery contests, Lincoln green fellowship, clever rescues, and courtesy toward the poor in the days of King Henry. Pyle’s Robin is bold and playful rather than grim; Little John, Friar Tuck, and the merry men turn skill into loyalty.
The Monroe Doctrine is the name later given to a few passages in President James Monroe's Seventh Annual Message to Congress, sent in writing on December 2, 1823, and read aloud to the new Eighteenth Congress. The library text gives the whole message, so readers can see the famous statements in their setting.
The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie's second Hercule Poirot novel, narrated like the first by Captain Arthur Hastings. Returning from Paris on the Calais boat-train, Hastings meets a pert young actress with black curls who calls herself Cinderella.
Captain Arthur Hastings, invalided home from the Western Front in 1916, meets his old friend John Cavendish and is invited to Styles Court, the Cavendish family's country house in Essex. The house belongs for her lifetime to John's stepmother, the generous and domineering Emily Inglethorp, who has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, a bearded man about twenty years younger whom the family suspect of wanting her money.
The New Roman Empire is a one-volume narrative history of the eastern Roman Empire, the state modern writers call Byzantium, from the reforms of Diocletian in the late third century to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its author, Anthony Kaldellis, is a historian at the University of Chicago, and the book was published by Oxford University Press at the end of 2023 (many catalogues date it 2024) in more than a thousand pages with maps, color plates and glossaries.
The Old Regime and the Revolution (L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution), published in Paris in June 1856, is Alexis de Tocqueville's study of France before 1789. Its argument is that the Revolution, which its makers believed had broken French history in two, in fact completed a work the monarchy had long been doing: the concentration of power in a central administration and the levelling of the French into similar, separated individuals.
The Open Society and Its Enemies is Karl Popper's two-volume critique of philosophies that claim to know the laws of history and to justify a closed, planned society. Popper wrote it in New Zealand between 1938 and 1943, after the annexation of Austria, as what he later called his war work, and it was published in London by Routledge in 1945.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is Hannah Arendt's attempt to understand how the Nazi and Soviet regimes, which she treats as a new form of government without precedent, could arise out of European history. It was published in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1951 (in Britain as The Burden of Our Time).
The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The Prince and the Pauper opens in London in October 1537, when two boys are born on the same day: Edward Tudor, longed-for son of Henry VIII, and Tom Canty, unwanted son of a thief in Offal Court, off Pudding Lane. Tom is beaten by his father John and his grandmother, but his gentle mother and sisters Nan and Bet love him, and the old priest Father Andrew teaches him reading, a little Latin, and tales of kings.
The Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
The Railway Children tells how Roberta (Bobbie), Peter and Phyllis lose their comfortable London life and find friends, work and courage beside a country railway line. One evening, just after Peter's birthday, two men call, Father goes away with them, and Mother will say only that he has gone on business and that the children must not ask.
The Republic begins with a question that never stays small: what is justice, and is the just life happier than the unjust? Socrates meets Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Piraeus.
Cicero wrote his two dialogues on the state in the troubled 50s BC, when the Roman Republic was strained by the private power of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus. On the Commonwealth (De re publica), published in 51 BC, imitates Plato's Republic but asks what the best constitution is for a real people, and answers with Rome itself.
The Rights of War and Peace (De jure belli ac pacis libri tres) is Hugo Grotius's treatise on the law that binds nations and rulers in war, published in Paris in 1625, seven years into the Thirty Years' War and while its author lived in exile from the Dutch Republic. The complete work has three books: Book I asks what war is, whether war can ever be lawful, and who holds the sovereign power to wage it; Book II examines the just causes of war, chiefly defence, the recovery of property and the punishment of wrongs, and with them property, contracts, treaties, embassies and the right of burial; Book III treats what may be done in war and the moderations (temperamenta) that humanity and good faith impose even on lawful force.
The Road to Serfdom is a short book by the Austrian-born economist F. A. Hayek, written in London during the Second World War and published by Routledge in March 1944 and by the University of Chicago Press that September. Hayek dedicated it to the socialists of all parties.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
The Scarlet Pimpernel opens in Paris in September 1792, at the height of the Revolution's Terror, where crowds gather at the city gates to watch aristocrats caught trying to flee. Sergeant Bibot boasts that no one will slip past him, yet the hideous old woman whose cart he waves through, after she hints that her grandson inside has smallpox, is the mysterious Englishman known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Comtesse de Tournay and her children are hidden beneath the load.
Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right is a compact treatise in four books, the only finished part of a larger work on political institutions that Rousseau abandoned. It opens with its most famous sentence, that man is born free and everywhere in chains, and with a promise not to explain how this happened but to say what could make it legitimate.
The Souls of Black Folk is a book of fourteen chapters framed by a short Forethought and Afterthought, in which W. E. B. Du Bois sets out to show readers what it meant to be Black in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century. He announces his subject at once: the great problem of the new century is the color line.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), published anonymously at Geneva in 1748 after many years of reading and travel, asks why the laws of different peoples differ and what makes them fit or unfit for those who live under them. His answer is that laws are relations: they must suit the form of government and also the climate and soil, the religion, commerce, manners and size of a nation.
The Stranger is a short novel in two parts narrated by Meursault, a young shipping clerk in Algiers in French Algeria, who reports what he sees and feels in plain, flat sentences and seldom explains himself. Part One, in six chapters, covers about eighteen days.
The Subjection of Women is John Stuart Mill's extended argument that the legal subordination of women to men in mid-Victorian Britain was wrong in principle and an obstacle to human improvement, and that it should give way to perfect equality before the law. Mill drafted it in 1860–1861, after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, and published it with Longmans in 1869.
The Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
This is the first of three volumes of Edward William Lane's translation of The Thousand and One Nights, made directly from the Arabic of the Cairo (Bulaq) printed edition and published in parts from 1838. The library text is the 1859 revision edited by his nephew Edward Stanley Poole, in the 1912 Chatto & Windus reissue with a preface by Stanley Lane-Poole.
The Three Musketeers follows a poor young gentleman from Gascony through three years of duels, court intrigue and war under Louis XIII, from 1625 to the fall of La Rochelle in 1628. D'Artagnan, eighteen years old, rides to Paris on a comic yellow pony with fifteen crowns, his father's advice and a letter of introduction to M. de Tréville, captain of the King's Musketeers.
The Trial follows Josef K., a respected chief clerk at a large bank in an unnamed city, from the morning of his thirtieth birthday, when two warders appear in his lodgings and tell him he is under arrest, to the eve of his thirty-first, when two men in frock coats lead him to a quarry and kill him. Neither K. nor the reader ever learns what he is accused of or what law he has broken.
The trial records of Joan of Arc are not a saint's life in the ordinary devotional sense. They are hostile legal documents that accidentally preserve one of the most vivid medieval voices.
The Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were the state legislatures' protests against the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed by a Federalist Congress and signed by President John Adams in June and July 1798 during the undeclared naval war with France. The Alien Friends Act let the President order dangerous aliens out of the country without trial; the Sedition Act made it a crime to publish false, scandalous and malicious writing against the government, Congress or the President.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights was adopted unanimously by the Virginia Convention at Williamsburg on 12 June 1776, three weeks before the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. On 15 May 1776 the same convention had instructed Virginia's delegates in Congress to propose independence and appointed a committee to prepare a declaration of rights and a plan of government.
An Act for establishing religious Freedom is a law of the Commonwealth of Virginia, passed by the General Assembly on 16 January 1786. Thomas Jefferson drafted it in 1777 as part of a committee's general revision of Virginia's laws after independence, and it was introduced in 1779, when it failed to pass.
The Warden is a quiet institutional novel about conscience, reform and the human cost of public righteousness. Septimus Harding is the gentle precentor of Barchester Cathedral and warden of Hiram's Hospital, a charitable almshouse for twelve elderly men.
Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in London by Strahan and Cadell on 9 March 1776, asks what makes a nation rich and what policies help or hinder that growth. Smith's answer is that wealth is not a store of gold and silver but the annual produce of a nation's labour, and that it grows chiefly through the division of labour, the accumulation of capital and the freedom to trade.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a historical novel in twenty-one chapters set in Connecticut Colony in 1687 and 1688. Katherine Tyler, called Kit, is sixteen and has grown up in freedom and comfort on her grandfather's plantation in Barbados.
Walter Hartright, a young London drawing-master, is engaged through his Italian friend Professor Pesca to teach watercolour at Limmeridge House in Cumberland. Walking home across Hampstead Heath late on the night before he leaves, he is touched on the shoulder by a woman dressed entirely in white who asks the way to London and speaks fondly of Limmeridge; soon after, two men in a chaise ask a policeman whether he has seen a woman escaped from an asylum.
Theodore Roosevelt's Autobiography, written at Sagamore Hill in 1913, is less a full life than a series of chapters on the work and convictions of a public man. A foreword dated 1 October 1913 calls for joining practical efficiency with lofty idealism.
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
John Adams's Thoughts on Government and selected letters present a founder preoccupied with constitutional balance, civic virtue, law, ambition, and the fragility of republics. Thoughts on Government, written in 1776, argues that new American states should avoid simple unicameral democracy and instead build mixed, balanced institutions with separated powers and independent courts.
In December 1965 a group of adults and students met at Christopher Eckhardt's home in Des Moines, Iowa, and decided to show their objection to the fighting in Vietnam and support for a truce by wearing black armbands over the holidays and fasting on 16 December and New Year's Eve. The principals of the Des Moines schools learned of the plan and on 14 December adopted a policy that any student wearing an armband would be asked to remove it and suspended if he refused.
To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise Finch, called Scout, looking back as an adult on three years of her childhood, from the summer she was nearly six, in Maycomb, a small, poor county seat in Alabama during the Depression of the 1930s. She lives with her older brother Jem, their widowed father Atticus, a lawyer and state legislator, and Calpurnia, the Black cook who helps raise them.
Mortgage Trust of America was a real estate investment trust advised by Transamerica Mortgage Advisors, Inc., known as TAMA, a subsidiary of the Transamerica Corporation. A shareholder of the trust sued in federal court, both derivatively on the trust's behalf and for a class of shareholders, naming the trust, several trustees, TAMA, Transamerica and another affiliate, Land Capital, Inc.
Dartmouth College began as the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock's charity school for teaching Indian youth to read and instructing them in the Christian faith. Funds raised in England, with the Earl of Dartmouth among the trustees of the English contributions, allowed Wheelock to seek a charter, and on 13 December 1769 the royal governor of New Hampshire, acting in the name of George III, incorporated twelve trustees with power to govern the college and fill their own vacancies.
In February 1969 National Industries, Inc. bought 34 percent of the voting stock of TSC Industries, Inc.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
In 1866 ships in several oceans report a huge, swift, glowing creature, and some are holed by it. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who happens to be in New York, publishes the opinion that it is a gigantic narwhal and is invited to join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln, under Commander Farragut, which sails to hunt it.
Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of her early life and of the settlement house she founded on Chicago's West Side in 1889. The first four chapters are autobiographical.
Uncle Tom's Cabin follows two lines of story that begin on the Kentucky farm of Arthur Shelby, a kindly but indebted master who agrees to sell two slaves to the trader Haley: Uncle Tom, his faithful and devout manager, and Harry, the small son of Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's maid. Overhearing the bargain, Eliza flees north with Harry that night, and with the slave-catchers close behind she crosses the Ohio River by leaping from one floating cake of ice to another.
United States v. Nixon, decided on 24 July 1974, resolved a confrontation between President Richard Nixon and the federal courts that grew out of the Watergate affair, the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices and the efforts that followed to conceal it.
James Herman O'Hagan was a partner in the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney. In July 1988 the London company Grand Metropolitan PLC retained the firm as local counsel for a possible tender offer for the Pillsbury Company.
Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents who lived there as merchants and were subjects of the Emperor of China. His parents returned to China in 1890.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Utopia is a dialogue in two books, written in Latin and presented as a true report. In Book I More, writing in his own person, recalls his embassy to Flanders in 1515 with Cuthbert Tunstall.
Before the Civil War the paper money of the United States consisted chiefly of notes issued by hundreds of state-chartered banks, of uneven credit and value. During the war Congress created a national currency: United States notes issued by the Treasury, and notes of new national banks chartered under the National Bank Acts of 1863 and 1864.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years and two months, from July 4, 1845, to September 1847, that he spent living alone in a one-room house he built himself beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He compresses the experiment into the cycle of a single year, moving from summer through winter to the thaw of spring, in eighteen chapters.
Washington had made it a crime to aid a suicide since its first territorial legislature acted in 1854. In January 1994 four physicians who treat terminally ill patients, led by Dr. Harold Glucksberg, joined three gravely ill patients (who died while the case was pending) and the nonprofit group Compassion in Dying in a suit in federal court.
We Hold These Truths collects John Courtney Murray's essays on the American constitutional experiment, natural law, religious liberty, pluralism, and the conditions of civil conversation. Murray argues that the American order depends on moral truths that public argument must continue to articulate, not merely procedural agreement or private preference.
The Harrison Narcotic Act, signed on 17 December 1914, was written as a revenue law. Anyone who imported, manufactured, sold or dispensed opium, coca leaves or their derivatives had to register with the collector of internal revenue and pay a special tax, and sales had to be made on official order forms.
Washington State's 1913 Minimum Wages for Women act declared that inadequate wages and unsanitary conditions harmed the health and morals of women and minors, and it created an Industrial Welfare Commission to fix wages sufficient for their decent maintenance. Elsie Parrish worked as a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, owned by the West Coast Hotel Company.
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, decided on Flag Day, 14 June 1943, held that no state may compel public school pupils to salute the flag and recite the pledge of allegiance.
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, decided on 9 November 1942, tested how far the commerce power of Congress could reach into the fields of a single farm.
Wisconsin v. Yoder, decided on 15 May 1972, asked whether a state may compel Amish parents to keep their children in school after the eighth grade.
In the late 1820s the Cherokee Nation, whose lands lay largely within Georgia's chartered limits, adopted a written constitution. Georgia responded by extending its jurisdiction over Cherokee country, and the discovery of gold in 1829 sharpened the conflict.
Nicholas Romeo, a man with a profound intellectual disability who could not speak and needed help with the most basic tasks, lived with his parents in Philadelphia until his father died in May 1974. His mother, unable to care for him or to manage his outbursts, asked a county court to admit him to a state facility, and in June 1974 he was committed to the Pennsylvania institution known as Pennhurst State School and Hospital.
Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v.
In 1995 a federal court placed the Cleveland City School District, which enrolled more than 75,000 mostly low-income children, under state control after findings of a crisis of magnitude; the district had met none of eighteen state performance standards. Ohio responded with several programs, including community (charter) schools, magnet schools and a Pilot Project Scholarship Program.