american law

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 606 pages. In this definitive biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson uses exclusive interviews and unrestricted access to Himes's full archives to portray a controversial American writer whose novels unflinchingly confront sex, racism, and black identity. Himes brutally rendered racial politics in the best-selling novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, but he became famous for his Harlem detective series, including Cotton Comes to Harlem. A serious literary tastemaker in his day, Himes had friendships-sometimes uneasy-with such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Wright. Jackson's scholarship and astute commentary illuminates Himes's improbable life-his middle-class origins, his eight years in prison, his painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and his escape to Europe for success. More than ten years in the writing, Jackson's biography restores the legacy of a fascinating maverick caught between his aspirations for commercial success and his disturbing, vivid portraits of the United States. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 263 pages. When the Chicago Daily News closed its doors in March 1978 after over a century of publication, the city mourned the loss of an American original. The Daily News boasted the inventive, aggressive writing of such luminaries as Carl Sandburg and Ben Hecht. It was also one of the first newspapers in the country to feature black-and-white photography. In 1900, staffers from the paper's art department began lugging bulky cameras, heavy glass plates, and explosive flash powder throughout the city. A labor strike, a boxing match, or a crime scene--it was all in a day's work for the Daily News photographer. These cameramen helped sell papers, but, as Mark Jacob and Richard Cahan reveal, they also made art. Chicago under Glass: Early Photographs from the Chicago Daily News is the first collection of images from the photo staff's early years, 1901 to 1930. Jacob and Cahan, seasoned journalists themselves, have selected more than 250 images--many of which have never before been published--from the nearly 57,000 glass negatives housed at the Chicago History Museum. They include rare photographs of a young Buster Keaton with his wife and child, waiting to board a train and the notorious Al Capone outside a courtroom, smoking a cigar and consulting with his lawyer. Each thematic section begins with a fascinating introduction by the authors, and each image is accompanied by insightful historical commentary.

Hardcover. NY, Time Life, reprint, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 401 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Dark blue leather bound with gilt titles to front cover and spine. Embossed decoration on front cover. Gilt text block edges, red ribbon marker. Clean, tight copy. This is one of the more impressive (and unfortunately little known) records of the American Civil War. John Beatty was a lawyer from Ohio who joined the Union Army when the South seceded. He started his service in western Virginia under General George B. McClellan. Although McClellan would later become one of the most well-known generals of the war, it was here that he first achieved the prominence that would lead to Lincoln promoting him to head Union forces on two separate occasions. Beatty, however, was clearly not enamored of McClellan. His journal opens with a description of arriving in one of the local railroad communities and subsequent entries describe the minutiae of camp life. Beatty is relatively unique among memoirists in that his book is largely a transcription of his original diary. As a result, his recollections are of recent events and have a degree of candor not present in many post-bellum narratives.

Softcover. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 118 pages. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. A Siamese cat beneath a clothes line, three women with linked arms standing on the front lawn, a man drying his hands on a dish towel in front of the kitchen stove. These scenes are part of Close to Home and the accompanying the Getty Museum exhibition held from October 12, 2004 to January 16, 2005, which celebrate snapshots--"found" photographs by anonymous photographers--that capture everyday life in all of its joy, banality, and mystery. Taken between 1930 and the mid-1960s, these photographs, most of them in black-and-white, create an unpretentious portrait of suburban American life by untrained photographers whose images can be unexpectedly lyrical and moving.

Softcover. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 118 pages. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. A Siamese cat beneath a clothes line, three women with linked arms standing on the front lawn, a man drying his hands on a dish towel in front of the kitchen stove. These scenes are part of Close to Home and the accompanying the Getty Museum exhibition held from October 12, 2004 to January 16, 2005, which celebrate snapshots--"found" photographs by anonymous photographers--that capture everyday life in all of its joy, banality, and mystery. Taken between 1930 and the mid-1960s, these photographs, most of them in black-and-white, create an unpretentious portrait of suburban American life by untrained photographers whose images can be unexpectedly lyrical and moving.

Hardcover. Birmingham AL, Legal Classics Library, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 508 pages, handsomely bound in black cowhide leather lettered and decorated in gilt, raised spine bands, all edges gilt, attached ribbon bookmarks, marbled endpapers. A facsimile of the original 1826 first edition. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Birmingham AL, Legal Classics Library, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 528 pages ,handsomely bound in black cowhide leather lettered and decorated in gilt, raised spine bands, all edges gilt, attached ribbon bookmarks, marbled endpapers. A facsimile of the original 1827 first edition. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Birmingham AL, Legal Classics Library, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 550 pages, handsomely bound in black cowhide leather lettered and decorated in gilt, raised spine bands, all edges gilt, attached ribbon bookmarks, marbled endpapers. A facsimile of the original 1830 first edition. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 402 pages. Remarkable study of smuggling, which illustrates how Americans related to the world from the Founding to World War I. From the beginning, the United States sought to build nationalism by limiting their own ability to trade with foreigners. But at the same time, Americans like Charles L. Lawrence defied customs authorities, insisting that trade be free. The government responded by building a potent army of customs inspectors and treasury agents, who profiled Jews, Asians, and women in the pursuit of tariff revenues.Beautifully written, the author uses the stories of smugglers like Jean Lafitte, Charles L. Lawrence, and Rose Eytinge to illustrate not only the history of Protectionism, but also the rise of American empire and the development of the modern social safety net. He shows that the tariff was far from an unpopular relic, but rather the foundation of the nineteenth century state. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Edward J. Clode, 1st , 1909, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth covers, 302 pages. Previous owners signature on front inside cover. Most of white on crystal ball decoration gone. Four small holes in back cover hinge. Rubbing and corner wear to covers. Melville Davisson Post (1869 ? 1930) was an American author, who wrote detective fiction. Post's best-known character is the mystery solving, justice dispensing "Uncle Abner". This volume is the 3rd in a series revolving around Randolph Mason, a lawyer whose knowledge of the law is so great that he can get away with just about anything.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott, 2nd Ed., 1865, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green pebbled cloth with gilt lettering on spine, 4" x 6 1/4", 303 pages including index. A detailed instructional guide for the Civil War era soldier. Copyright page states 1964, title page says 1865. Probably a second edition. Still scarce in this nice condition. A few pages with dog ears, previous owner's pencil signature on front fly leaf. Otherwise clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. America has had a love affair with the hard-boiled detective since the 1920s, when Prohibition called into question who really stood on the right and wrong side of the law. And nowhere did this hero shine more than in crime fiction. In Detectives in the Shadows, literary and cultural critic Susanna Lee tracks the evolution of this truly American character type from Race Williams to Philip Marlowe and from Mike Hammer to Jessica Jones. Lee explores how this character type morphs to fit an increasingly troubled world, offering compelling interpretations of The Wire, True Detective, and Jessica Jones. 216 pages, clean copy.

Hardcover. Germany, Taschen, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 3-vol set in slip case. Hardcovers. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Editor Dian Hanson traces the fascinating development of the genre from 1900 to 1969 in three compact, informative volumes. In Volume 1 you'll learn about the first magazines that appeared around 1900 in France, Germany, and the U.S., and follow the development of the genre through the First and Second World Wars. Covered are men's magazines masquerading as movie magazines, humor magazines, art magazines, nudist magazines, and "spicy" fiction. Volume 2 documents the proliferation of pin-up magazines following World War II, most notably a little item called Playboy that debuted in December 1953 and spawned dozens of imitators. This volume also charts the emergence of English men's magazines, fetish magazines, and the top five covergirls of the 1950s. Volume 3 begins with an explosion of new American pin-up magazines following the loosening of U.S. obscenity laws, and continues with French titles in decline, England going pervy; nudists going hippy, and Germany going pervy, hippy and political.

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two hardcover volumes. V.1; 164 pages with text, V.2; 227 plates in color and b&w. Gray cloth, gilt title spine. Lacking slipcase and dust jacket, but in excellent shape. A very nice, tight, clean set.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 223 pages, 250 color illustrations. Betsy Beinecke Shirley, one of the great collectors of American children's literature, gathered a peerless collection of books, original illustrations, manuscripts, and ephemera. This gorgeously illustrated book presents over 200 selected original artworks from the enchanting collection she bequeathed to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. Artists whose works are represented include many beloved favorites, among them Ludwig Bemelmans, Maurice Sendak, A. B. Frost, Wanda Gag, Peter Newell, N. C. Wyeth, Tony Sarg, Robert Lawson, and Johnny Gruelle. From variant illustrations for Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are to little-known sketches for nineteenth-century periodicals that delighted generations of children.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 232 pages. The question "What is American art?" might conjure the hyperrealism of Raphaelle Peale and William Harnett, the bold graphic style of Stuart Davis and Jacob Lawrence, or the Precisionist forms of Charles Sheeler. Little known, however, is that such notions of American art are significantly owed to a Russian Jewish immigrant named Edith Halpert. The founder of the Downtown Gallery in New York, Halpert shaped an identity for American art, declaring that its thrilling heterogeneity and democratic values were what most distinguished it from the European avant-garde. For forty-plus years, Halpert's gallery brought recognition and market success to now-legendary American artists--among them Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O'Keeffe, in addition to the artists mentioned above. She relentlessly championed nonwhite, female, and unknown artists and was a formative advisor in the shaping of many of the nation's most celebrated art museums and collections, from San Francisco to Boston. Not content with those achievements, she also pioneered the appreciation and collecting of American folk art. Richly illustrated with works that passed through her groundbreaking gallery, this book tells the extraordinary and largely overlooked story of her career and legacy. The artists Halpert launched into the American canon are household names--and this book compellingly argues that hers should be, as well. In publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. Lawrence KS, University Press of Kansas, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 274 pages. With the landmark election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, decades of Republican ascendancy gave way to a half century of Democratic dominance. It was nothing less than a major political realignment, as the direction of federal policy shifted from conservative to liberal-and liberalism itself was redefined in the process. Electing FDR is the first book in seventy years to examine in its entirety the 1932 presidential election that ushered in the New Deal. Award-winning historian Donald Ritchie looks at how candidates responded to the nation's economic crisis and how voters evaluated their performance. More important, he explains how the Democratic Party rebuilt itself after three successive Republican landslides: where the major shifts in party affiliation took place, what contingencies contributed to FDR's victory, and why the new coalition persisted as long as it did. Ritchie challenges prevailing assumptions that the Depression made Roosevelt's election inevitable. He shows that FDR came close to losing the nomination to contenders who might have run to the right of Hoover, and discusses the role of newspapers and radio in presenting the candidates to voters. He also analyzes Roosevelt's campaign strategies, recounting his attempts to appeal to disaffected voters of all ideological stripes, often by altering his positions to broaden his popularity. With the advent of the New Deal, Americans came to enjoy a wide federal safety net that provided everything from old age pensions to rural electricity-government innovations so embraced by voters that even later conservative presidents recognized their importance. Ritchie traces this legacy through the Reagan and Bush years, but he relates how FDR in 1932 was often vague about the specifics of his program and questions whether voters really knew what they were in for with the New Deal. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Lawrence KS, Coronado Press, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 217 pages, green cloth over boards. Limited to 400 copies. The author was a scholar on the banking business in the early American west, especially Kansas.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 580 pages, b&w illustrations. Los Angeles is a city founded on blood. Once a small Mexican pueblo teeming with Californios, Indians, and Americans, all armed with Bowie knives and Colt revolvers, it was among the most murderous locales in the Californian frontier. In Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, "a vivid, disturbing portrait of early Los Angeles" (Publishers Weekly), John Mack Faragher weaves a riveting narrative of murder and mayhem, featuring a cast of colorful characters vying for their piece of the city. These include a newspaper editor advocating for lynch laws to enact a crude manner of racial justice and a mob of Latinos preparing to ransack a county jail and murder a Texan outlaw. In this "groundbreaking" (True West) look at American history, Faragher shows us how the City of Angels went from a lawless outpost to the sprawling metropolis it is today. A riveting popular history of Los Angeles's bloody beginnings. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, WW Norton & Co, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 580 pages, 16 pages of illustrations. Eternity Street tells the story of a violent place in a violent time: the rise of Los Angeles from its origins as a small Mexican pueblo. In a masterful narrative, John Mack Faragher relates a dramatic history of conquest and ethnic suppression, of collective disorder and interpersonal conflict. Eternity Street recounts the struggle to achieve justice amid the turmoil of a loosely governed frontier, and it delivers a piercing look at the birth of this quintessentially American city. In the 1850s, the City of Angels was infamous as one of the most murderous societies in America. Saloons teemed with rowdy crowds of Indians and Californios, Mexicans and Americans. Men ambled down dusty streets, armed with Colt revolvers and Bowie knives. A closer look reveals characters acting in unexpected ways: a newspaper editor advocating lynch law in the name of racial justice; hundreds of Latinos massing to attack the county jail, determined to lynch a hooligan from Texas. Murder and mayhem in Edenic southern California. "There is no brighter sun...no country where nature is more lavish of her exuberant fullness," an Angeleno wrote in 1853. "And yet, with all our natural beauties and advantages, there is no country where human life is of so little account. Men hack one another to pieces with pistols and other cutlery as if God's image were of no more worth than the life of one of the two or three thousand ownerless dogs that prowl about our streets and make night hideous." Like-new.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 592 pages. Two-time Lincoln Prize-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo offers a marvelous portrait of the Civil War and its era, covering not only the major figures and epic battles, but also politics, religion, gender, race, diplomacy, and technology. And unlike other surveys of the Civil War era, it extends the reader's vista to include the postwar Reconstruction period and discusses the modern-day legacy of the Civil War in American literature and popular culture. Guelzo also puts the conflict in a global perspective, underscoring Americans' acute sense of the vulnerability of their republic in a world of monarchies. He examines the strategy, the tactics, and especially the logistics of the Civil War and brings the most recent historical thinking to bear on emancipation, the presidency and the war powers, the blockade and international law, and the role of intellectuals, North and South. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Bookman Associates, Inc., 1st, 1956, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. 242 pages. Page after copyright page torn out. Rubbing to corners and spine. Small tear to paper at front hinge.