The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Rome’s fall, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this “dead language” is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Jürgen Leonhardt has written a full history of Latin from antiquity to the present, uncovering how this once parochial dialect developed into a vehicle of global communication that remained vital long after its spoken form was supplanted by modern languages.

Latin originated in the Italian region of Latium, around Rome, and became widespread as that city’s imperial might grew. By the first century BCE, Latin was already transitioning from a living vernacular, as writers and grammarians like Cicero and Varro fixed Latin’s status as a “classical” language with a codified rhetoric and rules. As Romance languages spun off from their Latin origins following the empire’s collapse—shedding cases and genders along the way—the ancient language retained its currency as a world language in ways that anticipated English and Spanish, but it ceased to evolve.

Leonhardt charts the vicissitudes of Latin in the post-Roman world: its ninth-century revival under Charlemagne and its flourishing among Renaissance writers who, more than their medieval predecessors, were interested in questions of literary style and expression. Ultimately, the rise of historicism in the eighteenth century turned Latin from a practical tongue to an academic subject. Nevertheless, of all the traces left by the Romans, their language remains the most ubiquitous artifact of a once peerless empire.

The first book-length study of Latina/o experiences in World War II over a wide spectrum of identities and ancestries—from Cuban American, Spanish American, and Mexican American segments to the under-studied Afro-Latino experience—Latina/os and World War II probes the controversial aspects of Latina/o soldiering and citizenship in the war, the repercussions of which defined the West during the twentieth century. The editors also offer a revised, more accurate tabulation of the number of Latina/os who served in the war.

Spanning imaginative productions, such as vaudeville and the masculinity of the soldado razo theatrical performances; military segregation and the postwar lives of veterans; Tejanas on the homefront; journalism and youth activism; and other underreported aspects of the wartime experience, the essays collected in this volume showcase rarely seen recollections. Whether living in Florida in a transformed community or deployed far from home (including Mexican Americans who were forced to endure the Bataan Death March), the men and women depicted in this collection yield a multidisciplinary, metacritical inquiry. The result is a study that challenges celebratory accounts and deepens the level of scholarly inquiry into the realm of ideological mobility for a unique cultural crossroads. Taking this complex history beyond the realm of war narratives, Latina/os and World War II situates these chapters within the broader themes of identity and social change that continue to reverberate in postcolonial lives.

Insightful and enlightening, Latina/o/x Education in Chicago brings to light the ongoing struggle for educational equity in the Chicago Public Schools.

Every year an estimated 600,000 U.S. Latinos convert from Catholicism to Protestantism. Today, 12.5 million Latinos self-identify as Protestant--a population larger than all U.S. Jews and Muslims combined. Spearheading this spiritual transformation is the Pentecostal movement and Assemblies of God, which is the destination for one out of four converts. In a deeply researched social and cultural history, Gastón Espinosa uncovers the roots of this remarkable turn and the Latino AG's growing leadership nationwide.

Latino Pentecostals in America traces the Latino AG back to the Azusa Street Revivals in Los Angeles and Apostolic Faith Revivals in Houston from 1906 to 1909. Espinosa describes the uphill struggles for indigenous leadership, racial equality, women in the ministry, social and political activism, and immigration reform. His analysis of their independent political views and voting patterns from 1996 to 2012 challenges the stereotypes that they are all apolitical, right-wing, or politically marginal. Their outspoken commitment to an active faith has led a new generation of leaders to blend righteousness and justice, by which they mean the reconciling message of Billy Graham and the social transformation of Martin Luther King Jr. Latino AG leaders and their 2,400 churches across the nation represent a new and growing force in denominational, Evangelical, and presidential politics.

This eye-opening study explains why this group of working-class Latinos once called "the Silent Pentecostals" is silent no more. By giving voice to their untold story, Espinosa enriches our understanding of the diversity of Latino religion, Evangelicalism, and American culture.

To achieve justice and equal protection under the law, Latinos have turned to the U.S. court system to assert and defend their rights. Some of these cases have reached the United States Supreme Court, whose rulings over more than a century have both expanded and restricted the legal rights of Latinos, creating a complex terrain of power relations between the U.S. government and the country's now-largest ethnic minority. To map this legal landscape, Latinos and American Law examines fourteen landmark Supreme Court cases that have significantly affected Latino rights, from Botiller v. Dominguez in 1889 to Alexander v. Sandoval in 2001.

Carlos Soltero organizes his study chronologically, looking at one or more decisions handed down by the Fuller Court (1888-1910), the Taft Court (1921-1930), the Warren Court (1953-1969), the Burger Court (1969-1986), and the Rehnquist Court (1986-2005). For each case, he opens with historical and legal background on the issues involved and then thoroughly discusses the opinion(s) rendered by the justices. He also offers an analysis of each decision's significance, as well as subsequent developments that have affected its impact. Through these case studies, Soltero demonstrates that in dealing with Latinos over issues such as education, the administration of criminal justice, voting rights, employment, and immigration, the Supreme Court has more often mirrored, rather than led, the attitudes and politics of the larger U.S. society.

• Explores the history, growth, and diversity of the Latinx population.
• Draws on an array of census data, voter surveys, statistics, interviews, and health, education, employment, wages, and immigration statistics.
• Evaluates key trends in employment, education, religion, and health.
• Analyzes the dynamics of political participation, including implications of a growing Latino political electorate in a western swing state.
• Assesses key determinants of health disparities, educational inequities, and civic engagement among Latinos in the state.
• Demonstrates the impact of the Great Recession of 2008 and provides a preliminary assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic on Latino employment.

As a scholar, William Hung was instrumental in opening China’s rich documentary past to modern scrutiny. As an educator, he helped shape one of twentieth-century China’s most remarkable institutions, Yenching University. A member of the buoyant, Western-educated generation that expected to transform China into a modern, liberal nation, he saw his hopes darken as political turmoil, war with Japan, and the Communist takeover led to a different future. yet his influence was widespread; for his students became leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and he continued to teach in the United States through the 1970s.

In 1978, he began recalling his colorful life to Susan Chan Egan in weekly taping sessions. Egan draws on these tapes to let a skillful raconteur tell for himself anecdotes from his life as a religious and academic activist with a flair for the flamboyant. His reminiscences encompass the issues and dilemmas faced by Chinese intellectuals of his period. Among the notables who figured in his life and memories were Hu Shih, H. H. Kung, Henry Winter Luce, John Leighton Stuart, Timothy Lew, and Lu Chihwei.

While retaining the flavor of Hung’s reminiscences, Egan explains the evolution and importance of his scholarly work; captures his blend of Confucianism, mystical Christianity, and iconoclastic thought; and describes his effect on those around him. For it was finally his unyielding integrity and personal kindness as much as his accomplishments that caused him to be revered by colleagues and generations of students.

Harold Berman's masterwork narrates the interaction of evolution and revolution in the development of Western law. This new volume explores two successive transformations of the Western legal tradition under the impact of the sixteenth-century German Reformation and the seventeenth-century English Revolution, with particular emphasis on Lutheran and Calvinist influences. Berman examines the far-reaching consequences of these apocalyptic political and social upheavals on the systems of legal philosophy, legal science, criminal law, civil and economic law, and social law in Germany and England and throughout Europe as a whole.

Berman challenges both conventional approaches to legal history, which have neglected the religious foundations of Western legal systems, and standard social theory, which has paid insufficient attention to the communitarian dimensions of early modern economic law, including corporation law and social welfare.

Clearly written and cogently argued, this long-awaited, magisterial work is a major contribution to an understanding of the relationship of law to Western belief systems.

The roots of modern Western legal institutions and concepts go back nine centuries to the Papal Revolution, when the Western church established its political and legal unity and its independence from emperors, kings, and feudal lords. Out of this upheaval came the Western idea of integrated legal systems consciously developed over generations and centuries. Harold J. Berman describes the main features of these systems of law, including the canon law of the church, the royal law of the major kingdoms, the urban law of the newly emerging cities, feudal law, manorial law, and mercantile law. In the coexistence and competition of these systems he finds an important source of the Western belief in the supremacy of law.

Written simply and dramatically, carrying a wealth of detail for the scholar but also a fascinating story for the layman, the book grapples with wide-ranging questions of our heritage and our future. One of its main themes is the interaction between the Western belief in legal evolution and the periodic outbreak of apocalyptic revolutionary upheavals.

Berman challenges conventional nationalist approaches to legal history, which have neglected the common foundations of all Western legal systems. He also questions conventional social theory, which has paid insufficient attention to the origin of modern Western legal systems and has therefore misjudged the nature of the crisis of the legal tradition in the twentieth century.

Many people believe that conflict in the well-disciplined Japanese society is so rare that the Japanese legal system is of minor importance. Frank Upham shows conclusively that this view is mistaken and demonstrates that the law is extensively used, on the one hand, by aggrieved groups to articulate their troubles and mobilize political support and, on the other, by the government to channel and manage conflict after it has arisen.

This is the first Western book to take law seriously as an integral part of the dynamics of Japanese business and society, and to show how an informal legal system can work in a complex industrial democracy. Upham does this by focusing on four recent controversies with broad social implications: first, how Japan dealt with the world’s worst industrial pollution and eventually became a model for Western environmental reforms; second, how the police and courts have allowed one Japanese outcast group to use carefully orchestrated physical coercion to achieve wide-ranging affirmative action programs; third, how Japanese working women used the courts to force employers to eliminate many forms of discrimination and eventually convinced the government to pass an equal employment opportunity act; and, finally, how the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and various sectors of Japanese industry have used legal doctrine to cope with the dramatic changes in Japan’s economy over the last twenty-five years.

Readers interested in the interaction of law and society generally; those interested in contemporary Japanese sociology, politics, and anthropology; and American lawyers, businessmen, and government officials who want to understand how law works in Japan will all need this unusual new book.

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.

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.

In postrevolutionary America, the autonomous individual was both the linchpin of a young nation and a threat to the founders’ vision of ordered liberty. Conceiving of self-government as a psychological as well as a political project, jurists built a republic of laws upon the Enlightenment science of the mind with the aim of producing a responsible citizenry. Susanna Blumenthal probes the assumptions and consequences of this undertaking, revealing how ideas about consciousness, agency, and accountability have shaped American jurisprudence.

Focusing on everyday adjudication, Blumenthal shows that mental soundness was routinely disputed in civil as well as criminal cases. Litigants presented conflicting religious, philosophical, and medical understandings of the self, intensifying fears of a populace maddened by too much liberty. Judges struggled to reconcile common sense notions of rationality with novel scientific concepts that suggested deviant behavior might result from disease rather than conscious choice. Determining the threshold of competence was especially vexing in litigation among family members that raised profound questions about the interconnections between love and consent. This body of law coalesced into a jurisprudence of insanity, which also illuminates the position of those to whom the insane were compared, particularly children, married women, and slaves. Over time, the liberties of the eccentric expanded as jurists came to recognize the diversity of beliefs held by otherwise reasonable persons.

In calling attention to the problematic relationship between consciousness and liability, Law and the Modern Mind casts new light on the meanings of freedom in the formative era of American law.

The Law Code of Viṣṇu (Vaiṣṇava-Dharmaśāstra) is one of the latest of the ancient Indian legal texts composed around the seventh century CE in Kashmir. Both because the Vaiṣṇava-Dharmaśāstra is the only Dharmaśāstra that can be geographically located and because it introduces some interesting and new elements into the discussion of Dharmaśāstric topics, this is a document of interest both to scholars of Indian legal literature and to cultural historians of India, especially of Kashmir. The new elements include the first Dharmaśāstric evidence for a wife burning herself at her husband’s cremation and the intrusion of devotional religion (bhakti) into Dharmaśāstras.

This volume contains a critical edition of the Sanskrit text based on fifteen manuscripts, an annotated English translation, and an introduction evaluating its textual history, its connections to previous Dharmaśāstras, its date and provenance, its structure and content, and the use made of it by later medieval writers.

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research

The scale and the depth of Nazi brutality seem to defy understanding. What could drive people to fight, kill, and destroy with such ruthless ambition? Observers and historians have offered countless explanations since the 1930s. According to Johann Chapoutot, we need to understand better how the Nazis explained it themselves. We need a clearer view, in particular, of how they were steeped in and spread the idea that history gave them no choice: it was either kill or die.

Chapoutot, one of France’s leading historians, spent years immersing himself in the texts and images that reflected and shaped the mental world of Nazi ideologues, and that the Nazis disseminated to the German public. The party had no official ur-text of ideology, values, and history. But a clear narrative emerges from the myriad works of intellectuals, apparatchiks, journalists, and movie-makers that Chapoutot explores.

The story went like this: In the ancient world, the Nordic-German race lived in harmony with the laws of nature. But since Late Antiquity, corrupt foreign norms and values—Jewish values in particular—had alienated Germany from itself and from all that was natural. The time had come, under the Nazis, to return to the fundamental law of blood. Germany must fight, conquer, and procreate, or perish. History did not concern itself with right and wrong, only brute necessity. A remarkable work of scholarship and insight, The Law of Blood recreates the chilling ideas and outlook that would cost millions their lives.

The laws that governed the institution of slavery in early Texas were enacted over a fifty-year period in which Texas moved through incarnations as a Spanish colony, a Mexican state, an independent republic, a part of the United States, and a Confederate state. This unusual legal heritage sets Texas apart from the other slave-holding states and provides a unique opportunity to examine how slave laws were enacted and upheld as political and legal structures changed. The Laws of Slavery in Texas makes that examination possible by combining seminal historical essays with excerpts from key legal documents from the slave period and tying them together with interpretive commentary by the foremost scholar on the subject, Randolph B. Campbell.

Campbell's commentary focuses on an aspect of slave law that was particularly evident in the evolving legal system of early Texas: the dilemma that arose when human beings were treated as property. As Campbell points out, defining slaves as moveable property, or chattel, presented a serious difficulty to those who wrote and interpreted the law because, unlike any other form of property, slaves were sentient beings. They were held responsible for their crimes, and in numerous other ways statute and case law dealing with slavery recognized the humanness of the enslaved. Attempts to protect the property rights of slave owners led to increasingly restrictive laws—including laws concerning free blacks—that were difficult to uphold. The documents in this collection reveal both the roots of the dilemma and its inevitable outcome.

Winner of the John Phillip Reed Book Award, American Society for Legal History

A legal historian opens a window on the monumental postwar effort to remake fascist Germany and Japan into liberal rule-of-law nations, shedding new light on the limits of America’s ability to impose democracy on defeated countries.

Following victory in WWII, American leaders devised an extraordinarily bold policy for the occupations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: to achieve their permanent demilitarization by compelled democratization. A quintessentially American feature of this policy was the replacement of fascist legal orders with liberal rule-of-law regimes.

In his comparative investigation of these epic reform projects, noted legal historian R. W. Kostal shows that Americans found it easier to initiate the reconstruction of foreign legal orders than to complete the process. While American agencies made significant inroads in the elimination of fascist public law in Germany and Japan, they were markedly less successful in generating allegiance to liberal legal ideas and institutions.

Drawing on rich archival sources, Kostal probes how legal-reconstructive successes were impeded by German and Japanese resistance on one side, and by the glaring deficiencies of American theory, planning, and administration on the other. Kostal argues that the manifest failings of America’s own rule-of-law democracy weakened US credibility and resolve in bringing liberal democracy to occupied Germany and Japan.

In Laying Down the Law, Kostal tells a dramatic story of the United States as an ambiguous force for moral authority in the Cold War international system, making a major contribution to American and global history of the rule of law.

T. R. Fehrenbach Award, 1997

As he worked to build his Great Society, Lyndon Johnson often harkened back to his teaching days in the segregated "Mexican" school at Cotulla, Texas. Recalling the poverty and prejudice that blighted his students' lives, Johnson declared, "It never occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance—and I'll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it."

This book explores the complex and sometimes contradictory relations between LBJ and Mexican Americans. Julie Pycior shows that Johnson's genuine desire to help Mexican Americans—and reap the political dividends—did not prevent him from allying himself with individuals and groups intent on thwarting Mexican Americans' organizing efforts. Not surprisingly, these actions elicited a wide range of response, from grateful loyalty to, in some cases, outright opposition. Mexican Americans' complicated relationship with LBJ influenced both their political development and his career with consequences that reverberated in society at large.

Decades later, the Vietnam War remains a divisive memory for American society. Partisans on all sides still debate why the war was fought, how it could have been better fought, and whether it could have been won at all.

In this major study, a noted expert on the war brings a needed objectivity to these debates by examining dispassionately how and why President Lyndon Johnson and his administration conducted the war as they did. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the LBJ Library, including the Tom Johnson notes from the influential Tuesday Lunch Group, George Herring discusses the concept of limited war and how it affected President Johnson's decision making, Johnson's relations with his military commanders, the administration's pacification program of 1965-1967, the management of public opinion, and the "fighting while negotiating" strategy pursued after the Tet Offensive in 1968.

The author's in-depth analysis exposes numerous flaws in Johnson's management of the war. In Herring's view, the Johnson administration lacked any overall strategy for conducting the war. No change in approach was ever discussed, despite popular and even administration dissatisfaction with the progress of the war, and no oversight committee coordinated the activities of the military services and various governmental agencies, which were left to follow their own, often conflicting, agendas.

During the five full years of his presidency (1964–1968), Lyndon Johnson initiated a breathtaking array of domestic policies and programs, including such landmarks as the Civil Rights Act, Head Start, Food Stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, the Immigration Reform Act, the Water Quality Act, the Voting Rights Act, Social Security reform, and Fair Housing. These and other “Great Society” programs reformed the federal government, reshaped intergovernmental relations, extended the federal government’s role into new public policy arenas, and redefined federally protected rights of individuals to engage in the public sphere. Indeed, to a remarkable but largely unnoticed degree,Johnson’s domestic agenda continues to shape and influence current debates on major issues such as immigration, health care, higher education funding, voting rights, and clean water, even though many of his specific policies and programs have been modified or, in some cases, dismantled since his presidency.

LBJ’s Neglected Legacy examines the domestic policy achievements of one of America’s most effective, albeit controversial, leaders. Leading contributors from the fields of history, public administration, economics, environmental engineering, sociology, and urban planning examine twelve of LBJ’s key domestic accomplishments in the areas of citizenship and immigration, social and economic policy, science and technology, and public management. Their findings illustrate the enduring legacy of Johnson’s determination and skill in taking advantage of overwhelming political support in the early years of his presidency to push through an extremely ambitious and innovative legislative agenda, and emphasize the extraordinary range and extent of LBJ’s influence on American public policy and administration.

In presidential election years the leadership qualities of occupants of the Oval Office become yardsticks for aspiring candidates. What profile of qualities, both positive and negative, helps explain the performance of chief executives? In this book about the White House, nine eminent political scientists and historians present their assessments of the leadership styles and organizational talents of presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. Filled with anecdote and insight, this is an unprecedented opportunity to observe how the running of the office of President has been changed, subtly and not so subtly, by the management and personal styles of the various incumbents within their historical contexts.

The book vividly depicts each president. There is Roosevelt, “a real artist in government”; Truman, a strong executive who always managed to appear weak; Eisenhower, who cultivated the image of being “above the fray” of politics but was actually fully occupied with getting political results; Kennedy, who successfully projected the symbolic grandeur of his office; Johnson, a figure from classical tragedy; Nixon, who preferred a corporate to a political mode of operation; Ford, who placed healing the nation’s wounds from Vietnam and Watergate above his personal political future; Carter, whose fall was as stunning as his rise was meteoric. The chapter on Reagan is an impassioned encomium of the president as a folk philosopher that is bound to be controversial.

These accounts of leadership by modern presidents are acute studies of how the presidency has become the first among equals in our tripartite system of government. This book will be important to political scientists, historians, and government officials, and the liveliness of its presentation and the quotidian impact of the men it describes will make it attractive to everyone interested in how we are governed and who is doing the governing.