Sunday Book Roundup

The Federal Lawyer has a new issue, with several book reviews of note. Benjamin H. Barton's Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession (Oxford University Press) is reviewed. More legal history is found in a review of Licensed to Practice: The Supreme Court Defines the American Medical Profession by James C. Mohr (Johns Hopkins University). There's also a review of James M. Denham's Fifty Years of Justice: A History of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida (University Press of Florida). All reviews from the September issue can be found here.

New Books has an interview with George H. Nash about his book The Crusade Years, 1933-1955: Herbert Hoover's Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and Its Aftermath (Hoover Institution Press). And, Natalia Molina discusses her book, How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (University of California Press).

"In her fascinating new study ...  Professor of History and Urban Studies at UC San Diego Natalia Molina advances the study of U.S. immigration history and race relations by connecting the themes of race and citizenship in the construction of American racial categories. Using archival records held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the U.S. Congress, local governments, and immigrant rights groups, Dr. Molina examines the period of Mexican immigration to the U.S. from 1924-1965. Employing a relational lens to her study, Professor Molina advances the theory of racial scripts to describe how ideas about Mexicans and Mexican immigration have been fashioned out of preexisting racial projects that sought to exclude African Americans and Asian immigrants from acquiring the full benefits of American citizenship."

Ari Berman talks about his Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (Farrar Straus Giroux) on Politics & Prose.

H-Net adds several more reviews to the mix, including one of Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America by Rachel Hope Cleves (Oxford University Press).

The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1989 by Lisa Tetrault (UNC Press) is reviewed on H-Net.

"Tetrault examines the myth that the 1848 meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, launched the woman suffrage movement. She does not argue that the Seneca Falls meeting was unimportant. Instead, she states that it has become a “venerated and celebrated story” that requires further scrutiny (p. 5). Tetrault demonstrates that Stanton and Anthony crafted this historical narrative during the late nineteenth century to ensure that their contemporaries and later generations recognized them as the movement’s leaders. By dating the movement to this meeting, Stanton, who helped organize the event and drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, became a founding mother. Inaccurate accounts placed Anthony at the meeting as well."

Lowell J. Soike's Busy in the Cause  Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War (University of Nebraska Press) is reviewed as well on H-Net.

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