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In A Journey through the West, Thomas Rodney writes vividly about flea-infested taverns, bad roads, drunken crew members, squatters, Indians sodden berths, food from the wild and treacherous waters. His is one of the most detailed early-nineteenth-century travel accounts.

Rodney, a Revolutionary War patriot and veteran, had been active in Delaware politics and had served in the Continental Congress. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson appointed him as a land commissioner and a territorial judge in the newly formed Mississippi Territory. To assume his duties, Rodney and a small party traveled overland from Delaware across the length of southern Pennsylvania to Wheeling, (West) Virginia. From there, they boarded their newly constructed boat on the Ohio River and rowed, sailed, and drifted along the borders of (West) Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky.

Finally they left the clear rapids of the Ohio and entered the muddy yet majestic Mississippi. They traveled southwesterly into a vast, exotic wilderness valley. The western shore of the Mississippi was still owned by Spain, and foreign soldiers were spotted. Under pressure to meet Rodney’s deadline for arrival in Mississippi Territory, the travelers were grateful for the Mississippi’s fast current. Yet in the journey’s last days they were faced with adventures and with near disaster when their boat struck a snag and partially sank.

Rodney kept a precise journal and sent letters to President Jefferson documenting his trek from the settled East through the barely chartered paths of the western wilderness. He hobnobbed with Meriwether Lewis, enjoyed the hospitality of Harman Blennerhassett, and received a tour of Cincinnati from Arthur St. Clair.

Dwight Smith and Ray Swick have compiled, edited and annotated Rodney’s story to present it in complete form for the first time. A Journey through the West is both a travel adventure and a colorful glimpse into the life of his day.

Clara Jean Mosley Hall has inhabited various cultural worlds in her life: Native American, African American, Deaf, and hearing. The hearing daughter of a Deaf Nanticoke man, who grew up in Dover, Delaware’s Black community in the 1950s and 60s, Hall describes the intersections of these identities in Paris in America. By sharing her father’s experiences and relating her own struggles and successes, Hall honors her father’s legacy of hard work and perseverance and reveals the complexities of her own unique background.
​​      Hall was abandoned by her Deaf African American mother at a young age and forged a close bond with her father, James Paris Mosley, who communicated with her in American Sign Language. Although his family was Native American, they—like many other Nanticoke Native Americans of that region—had assimilated over time into Dover’s Black community. Hall vividly recounts the social and cultural elements that shaped her, from Jim Crow to the forced integration of public schools, to JFK and Motown. As a Coda (child of deaf adults) in a time when no accessibility or interpreting services were available, she was her father’s sole means of communication with the hearing world, a heavy responsibility for a child. After her turbulent teenage years, and with the encouragement of her future husband, she attended college and discovered that her skills as a fluent ASL user were a valuable asset in the field of education.
​​      Hall went on to become a college professor, mentor, philanthropist, and advocate for Deaf students from diverse backgrounds. Her memoir is a celebration of her family, her faith, her journey, and her heritage.

Over the past few decades, significant changes have occurred across capital markets. Shareholder activists have become more prominent, institutional investors have begun to wield more power, and intermediaries like investment advisory firms have greatly increased their influence. These changes to the economic environment in which corporations operate have outpaced changes in basic corporate law and left corporations uncertain of how to respond to the new dynamics and adhere to their fiduciary duties to stockholders.
           
With The Corporate Contract in Changing Times, Steven Davidoff Solomon and Randall Stuart Thomas bring together leading corporate law scholars, judges, and lawyers from top corporate law firms to explore what needs to change and what has prevented reform thus far. Among the topics addressed are how the law could be adapted to the reality that activist hedge funds pose a more serious threat to corporations than the hostile takeovers and how statutory laws, such as the rules governing appraisal rights, could be reviewed in the wake of appraisal arbitrage. Together, the contributors surface promising paths forward for future corporate law and public policy.