Phillip Paludan has combined the findings of the social sciences with an exercise in la petite histoire to create an intriguing study. From his base point, the massacre of thirteen Unionist mountaineers at Shelton Laurel, North Carolina, the author expands the investigation to embrace larger issues, such as the impact of the Civil War on small communities, the causation and characteristics of guerrilla warfare, and the focus underlying human perversity." —Civil War History ". . . the definitive history of the Shelton Laurel Massacre, but more important it is a pathbreaking study of a principal theater of the guerrilla aspect of the Civil War. Paludan has succeeded admirably in rooting a historically neglected topic in the lives of ordinary people."—Frank L. Byrne, American Historical Review "The questions Paludan asks about Shelton Laurel in 1863 are appropriate to My Lai in 1968 and Auschwitz in 1944. Victims is not only a good book; it is also an important book. And it is a profoundly disturbing book."—Emory M. Thomas, Georgia Historical Quarterly "Outwardly a superb analysis of the impact of war and war-time atrocity on the life of a remote mountain community, this slim volume harbors far-reaching implications for the study of class conflict and the modernization process in the Appalachian region."—Ron Eller, Appalachian Journal
In January 1863, in the isolated mountains of western North Carolina, Confederate soldiers captured and murdered thirteen victims they suspected of being Unionist guerrillas. First published in 1981, Victims traces the lives and personalities of both killer and victims, illuminating the pressures that can bring men anywhere to commit atrocities more heinous than war itself.
Republishes articles by two senior legal historians. Besides summarizing what has now become classical literature in the field, it offers illuminating insight into what it means to be a professional legal historian.
John Phillip Reid is one of the most highly regarded historians of law as it was practiced on the state level in the nascent United States. He is not just the recipient of numerous honors for his scholarship but the type of historian after whom such accolades are named: the John Phillip Reid Award is given annually by the American Society for Legal History to the author of the best book by a mid-career or senior scholar. Legitimating the Law is the third installment in a trilogy of books by Reid that seek to extend our knowledge about the judicial history of the early republic by recounting the development of courts, laws, and legal theory in New Hampshire. Here Reid turns his eye toward the professionalization of law and the legitimization of legal practices in the Granite State—customs and codes of professional conduct that would form the basis of judiciaries in other states and that remain the cornerstone of our legal system to this day throughout the US. Legitimating the Law chronicles the struggle by which lawyers and torchbearers of strong, centralized government sought to bring standards of competence to New Hampshire through the professionalization of the bench and the bar—ambitions that were fought vigorously by both Jeffersonian legislators and anti-Federalists in the private sector alike, but ultimately to no avail.
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