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In these essays J. Willard Hurst shows the correlation between the conception of individual freedom and the application of law in the nineteenth-century United States—how individuals sought to use law to increase both their personal freedom and their opportunities for personal growth. These essays in jurisprudence and legal history are also a contribution to the study of social and intellectual history in the United States, to political science, and to economics as it concerns the role of public policy in our economy. The nonlawyer will find in them demonstration of how "technicalities" express deep issues of social values.

Despite international conventions and human rights declarations, millions of people have suffered and continue to suffer torture, slavery, or violent deaths, with no remedy or recourse. They have fallen, in essence, “below the law,” outside of law’s protection. Often violated by their own governments, sometimes with support from transnational corporations, or nations benefiting from human rights violations, how can these victims find justice?  Lawyers Beyond Borders reveals the inner workings of the advances and retreats in the quest for redress and restoration of human rights for those whom international legal-political systems have failed. The process of justice begins in the US, with a handful of human rights lawyers steeped in the American tradition of advancing civil rights through civil litigation. As the civil rights movement gained traction and an ample supply of lawyers, this small cadre turned their attention toward advancing international human rights, via the US legal system. They sought to build another piece of the rights revolution, this time for survivors of egregious human rights violations in faraway lands. These cases were among the most unlikely to be slated for victory: The abuses occurred abroad; the victims are aliens, usually with few, if any, resources; the perpetrators are politically powerful, resourced, and well connected, often members of governments, militaries, or multinational corporations. The legal and political systems’ structures are mostly stacked against these survivors, many who bear the scars of trauma and terror.

Lawyers Beyond Borders is about agency. It is about how, in the face of powerful interests and seemingly insurmountable obstacles—political, psychological, economic, geographical, and physical—a small group of lawyers and survivors navigated a terrain of daunting barriers to begin building, case-by-case, new pathways to justice for those who otherwise would have none.

The gripping story of the attempted murder of Scottsboro attorney and state legislator Loy Campbell

“As with any good book about a great event, this one has a little of everything—suspense, humor, pathos, melodrama.” —Journal of Southern History

On a quiet December morning in 1972, Scottsboro attorney and former state legislator Loy Campbell started his car and detonated a bomb hidden beneath the hood. The explosion tore through the vehicle, cost him both legs, and nearly killed him, shattering the calm of the northeast Alabama town. Lay Down with Dogs reconstructs the attempted assassination of Campbell and subsequent trial. As Alabama’s young and ambitious attorney general, Bill Baxley took personal charge of the case. He led the state’s investigation and prosecution against those accused of planning and financing the assassination attempt, most notably Hugh Otis Bynum Jr., one of the most powerful local figures in Scottsboro. More than a crime story, it is a gripping account of violence, power, and survival at a volatile moment in modern Southern history. 

Drawing on court records, investigative files, contemporary journalism, and firsthand testimony, Byron Woodfin offers the most comprehensive account of the bombing and its aftermath. With the skill of an experienced historian and storyteller, the narrative follows both the painstaking investigation and the dramatic prosecution that ultimately exposed the forces behind the attack. The author’s deep familiarity with Alabama history and legal culture lends authority and insight, while a clear, compelling prose style keeps the story moving with the momentum of a true‑crime classic. 

Lay Down with Dogs will appeal to readers of Southern history, legal history, and true crime, as well as anyone interested in justice, civic life, and unsolved tensions in twentieth‑century America. It is ideal for scholars, students, and general readers seeking a powerful, unsettling, and unforgettable story rooted in real events.

Reclaiming Southern history through the voices, memories, and experiences of African Americans.

In Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity, Patricia Davis identifies the Civil War as the central narrative around which official depictions of southern culture have been defined. Because that narrative largely excluded African American points of view, the resulting southern identity was monolithically white. Davis traces how the increasing participation of black public voices in the realms of Civil War memory—battlefields, museums, online communities—has dispelled the mirage of “southernness” as a stolid cairn of white culture and has begun to create a more fluid sense of southernness that welcomes contributions by all of the region’s peoples.

Laying Claim offers insightful and penetrating examinations of African American participation in Civil War reenactments; the role of black history museums in enriching representations of the Civil War era with more varied interpretations; and the internet as a forum within which participants exchange and create historical narratives that offer alternatives to unquestioned and dominant public memories. From this evolving cultural landscape, Davis demonstrates how simplistic caricatures of African American experiences are giving way to more authentic, expansive, and inclusive interpretations of southernness.

As a case-study and example of change, Davis cites the evolution of depictions of life at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Where visitors to the site once encountered narratives that repeated the stylized myth of Monticello as a genteel idyll, modern accounts of Jefferson’s day offer a holistic, inclusive, and increasingly honest view of Monticello as the residents on every rung of the social ladder experienced it.

Contemporary violence and attacks about or inspired by the causes, outcomes, and symbols of the Civil War, even one hundred and fifty years after its end, add urgency to Davis’s argument that the control and creation of public memories of that war is an issue of concern not only to scholars but all Americans. Her hopeful examination of African American participation in public memory illuminates paths by which this enduring ideological impasse may find resolutions.

How the University of Texas shaped twelve people who changed the world.

College is a time for personal growth. But any Biology 101 student knows that growth (personal or otherwise) requires the right environment. Collecting the revealing and deeply personal stories of twelve UT alumni who became leaders in their fields, Leadership Gets Personal honors the transformative impact of the Forty Acres on those who learn and grow there.

Matthew McConaughey, Academy Award-winning actor and #1 New York Times best-selling author, was destined for law school, but with the encouragement of his UT community, he realized he was a born storyteller. Brené Brown, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Dare to Lead, struggled for years before finding her purpose in the Social Work Department. Dr. Amy Ho knew she wanted to change the American health care system, and at UT she gained the confidence and skills to make a difference. Astronaut Karen Nyberg was a shy kid; her UT graduate studies propelled her to space. And Darren Walker would go on to become president of the Ford Foundation, taking inspiration from the financial aid counselors who made sure he got the education he yearned for. For these and other outstanding alumni profiled here, the road was often rocky. Through perseverance, humility, and collaboration, they learned not only to exercise leadership but to live it.

This book offers

• Step-by-step directions for both the educator and learner and all necessary handouts, including directions and worksheets. The reader can use the book to quickly and easily set up centers. Some centers require only photocopies and basic materials to get started.
• Guidance on how to create cross-curricular centers that target the AASL Standards and other content-area standards. A table is provided to enable educators to create centers that address specific standards or content areas. Centers for distance learning are also identified.
• Suggested modifications for both struggling and advanced learners, plus ideas for collaborating with other educators. These features broaden the potential audience beyond elementary school learners. 

Rooting her account in John Dewey’s ideas, Goddard moves from early nineteenth century supporters of the union of learning and labor to the interconnected histories of CMTS, New Jersey’s Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, North Dakota’s Normal and Industrial School, and related programs elsewhere. Goddard analyzes the work of movement figures like abolitionist Theodore Weld, educators Calvin Woodward and Booker T. Washington, social critic W.E.B. Du Bois, Dewey himself, and his influential Chicago colleague Ella Flagg Young. The book contrasts ideas about manual training held by advocate Nicholas Murray Butler with those of opponent William Torrey Harris and considers overlooked connections between industrial education and the Arts and Crafts Movement.

An absorbing merger of history and storytelling, Learning for Work looks at the people who shaped industrial education while offering a provocative vision of realizing its potential today.

A steel town daughter’s search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Alabama

“As Birmingham goes, so goes the nation,” Fred Shuttlesworth observed when he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to the city for the transformative protests of 1963. From the height of the Civil Rights Movement through its long aftermath, images of police dogs, fire hoses and four girls murdered when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church have served as an uncomfortable racial mirror for the nation. Like many white people who came of age in the Civil Rights Movement’s wake, Julie Buckner Armstrong knew little about this history. Only after moving away and discovering writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker did she realize how her hometown and family were part of a larger, ongoing story of struggle and injustice.

When Armstrong returned to Birmingham decades later to care for her aging mother, Shuttlesworth’s admonition rang in her mind. By then an accomplished scholar and civil rights educator, Armstrong found herself pondering the lessons Birmingham holds for a twenty-first century America. Those lessons extended far beyond what a 2014 Teaching Tolerance report describes as the common distillation of the Civil Rights Movement into “two names and four words: Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and ‘I have a dream.’” Seeking to better understand a more complex local history, its connection to broader stories of oppression and resistance, and her own place in relation to it, Armstrong embarked on a journey to unravel the standard Birmingham narrative to see what she would find.

Beginning at the center, with her family’s 1947 arrival to a housing project near the color line, within earshot of what would become known as Dynamite Hill, Armstrong works her way over time and across the map. Weaving in stories of her white working-class family, classmates, and others not traditionally associated with Birmingham’s civil rights history, including members of the city’s LGBTQ community, she forges connections between the familiar and lesser-known. The result is a nuanced portrait of Birmingham--as seen in public housing, at old plantations, in segregated neighborhoods, across contested boundary lines, over mountains, along increasingly polluted waterways, beneath airport runways, on highways cutting through town, and under the gaze of the iconic statue of Vulcan.

In her search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Armstrong draws on the powers of place and storytelling to dig into the cracks, complicating easy narratives of civil rights progress. Among the discoveries she finds in America’s racial mirror is a nation that has failed to recognize itself in the horrific images from Birmingham’s past and to acknowledge the continuing inequalities that make up the Civil Right’s Movement’s unfinished business. Learning from Birmingham reminds us that stories of civil rights, structural oppression, privilege, abuse, race and gender bias, and inequity are difficult and complicated, but their telling, especially from multiple stakeholder perspectives, is absolutely necessary.