The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms

Author:   Alison L. LaCroix
Publisher:   Yale University Press
ISBN:  

9780300223217


Pages:   576
Publication Date:   13 August 2024
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms


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Overview

A synthesis of legal, political, and social history to show how the post-founding generations were forced to rethink and substantially revise the U.S. constitutional vision Between 1815 and 1861, American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity. The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles, combined with a thoroughgoing commitment to investing those principles with meaning through debate. Each of these shared principles—commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity—concerned what we now call ""federalism,"" meaning that they pertain to the relationships among multiple levels of government with varying degrees of autonomy. Alison L. LaCroix argues, however, that there existed many more federalisms in the early nineteenth century than today's constitutional debates admit. As LaCroix shows, this was a period of intense rethinking of the very basis of the U.S. national model—a problem debated everywhere, from newspapers and statehouses to local pubs and pulpits, ultimately leading both to civil war and to a new, more unified constitutional vision. This book is the first that synthesizes the legal, political, and social history of the early nineteenth century to show how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time.

Full Product Details

Author:   Alison L. LaCroix
Publisher:   Yale University Press
Imprint:   Yale University Press
ISBN:  

9780300223217


ISBN 10:   0300223218
Pages:   576
Publication Date:   13 August 2024
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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Reviews

“No scholar is better equipped to challenge our understanding of the history of federalism than Alison LaCroix. In this pioneering study, she recovers the spirited, contingent, decades-long argument that shaped an era that most constitutional historians have dismissed as uneventful. Essential reading.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States “Alison LaCroix’s invaluable book is a fount of information and brilliant insights about a grievously neglected period of American constitutional development. It is often gripping in the stories it relates. This is truly essential reading.”—Sanford Levinson, author of An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century “A brilliant, alternately rollicking and harrowing account of the law in action in the nineteenth-century United States. Prodigiously researched and bristling with startling revisionist arguments, this book is far and away the best account of the roiling world of American federalism in the crucial decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The Interbellum Constitution carries urgent lessons for the emerging federal-state battles of our times.”—John Fabian Witt, author of American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19


Author Information

Alison L. LaCroix is Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law and Associate Member of the History Department at the University of Chicago. She served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and is the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism.

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