ABSTRACT

Nineteenth-century America witnessed some of the most important and fruitful areas of intersection between the law and humanities, as people began to realize that the law, formerly confined to courts and lawyers, might also find expression in a variety of ostensibly non-legal areas such as painting, poetry, fiction, and sculpture. Bringing together leading researchers from law schools and humanities departments, this Companion touches on regulatory, statutory, and common law in nineteenth-century America and encompasses judges, lawyers, legislators, litigants, and the institutions they inhabited (courts, firms, prisons). It will serve as a reference for specific information on a variety of law- and humanities-related topics as well as a guide to understanding how the two disciplines developed in tandem in the long nineteenth century.

part I|113 pages

Human kinds

chapter 1|15 pages

Women

Politics, culture, and the law

chapter 6|18 pages

The Legal Person

Tracing the history of a forensic fiction

part II|91 pages

A new archive

chapter 8|19 pages

Spectacular Judgments

Law and disorder in the nineteenth-century visual imagination

chapter 9|13 pages

Legal Language

Expansion, consolidation, resistance

chapter 10|25 pages

The Impersonation of Justice

Lynching, dueling, and wildcat strikes in nineteenth-century America

part III|100 pages

Managing the human

chapter 13|17 pages

The Science of Identity

chapter 15|17 pages

How Meetings Won the West

chapter 16|16 pages

A Gatekeeping Nation

Asian invasion and the rise of xenophobic immigration law

chapter 17|17 pages

Fictions of Race and Personality

Nineteenth-century law and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson

part IV|62 pages

Affective relations

chapter 19|17 pages

“Vital Tissues of the Spirit”

Constitutional emotions in the antebellum United States

chapter 20|16 pages

Beyond Belief

Religion, law, and popular culture in the “forgotten century”