Book picks similar to
The Laws and the Land: The Settler Colonial Invasion of Kahnawà:ke in Nineteenth-Century Canada by Daniel Rück
microhistories
planning-urbanism-environment
political-history
canadian-history
The Story of Jane Doe
Jane Doe - 2003
Even though the police had full knowledge of the rapist’s modus operandi, they made a conscious decision not to issue a warning to women in her neighbourhood. Jane Doe quickly realized that women were being used by the police as bait. The rapist was captured as a result of a tip received after she and a group of women distributed 2,000 posters alerting the community. During the criminal proceedings, Jane Doe became the first raped woman in Ontario to secure her own legal representation -- allowing her to sit in on the hearings instead of out in the hall where victim-witnesses are usually cloistered. As a result, Jane heard details of the police investigation normally withheld from women in her position, which revealed a shocking degree of police negligence and gender discrimination. When the rapist was convicted, the comfort was cold. In 1987, Jane Doe sued the Metropolitan Police Force for negligence and charter violation. It took eleven long years before her civil case finally came to trial -- the rest is history.This extraordinary book asks the diffcult question: Who benefits from rape? Popular ideas about rape still inform the way police and society behave around raped women. Despite decades of trying to rewrite the myths, the myths still exist, and they tell us that women lie about rape, that women enjoy it, that women file false rape reports to seek revenge and money. They tell us rape can be non-violent. They tell us that women can make good or bad rape victims or that women cannot be raped at all. They tell us nonsense -- and Jane Doe gives us a unique view on why.This is a book about rape that is not about being a “victim.” It’s about a woman who wanted to ensure that she, the person most involved, directed her case and the course of her life. It’s about external elements colliding to provide a small window of redress for women who experience crimes of violence. Jane Doe was a test case -- the right woman in the wrong place at the right time -- and she made legal history.In The Story of Jane Doe, she asks us to challenge our own assumptions about rape and, in the process, surprises us with a story that is by turns sweet, tragic, and fantastical. But most of all, this book celebrates what is most common in human nature -- our ability to overcome.“Rape stories are not new stories. They are as old as war, as old as man. Many bookstores have sections devoted to them, and I read them. I read them “before,” too. I have found most rape stories to be either chronicles of fear and horror, victim tales that make me want to run screaming from the page (although I do not). Or they are dry, academic or legal treatises on why rape is bad, written in language I must work to understand. Both are valid. But both somehow limit me from reaching a broader understanding . . . No book has ever reflected my lived experience of the crime.” -- Jane DoeFrom the Hardcover edition.
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
Thomas Sowell - 1986
In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.
Satan's Advice to Young Lawyers
Aleister Lovecraft - 2014
Satan's Advice to Young Lawyers is a pithy guide to rising from lowly first-year associate to renowned leader of the legal community.Inside the pages of this remarkable book, Satan offers his profound counsel on topics as diverse as choosing evil as a path to power, the billable hour, how to steal clients from your law firm, fashion, and more.Do not let your competition have these secrets for themselves. Get the book now.This profound guidebook makes a great gift for your favorite law student, bar exam taker, bar exam passer or new lawyer.
Big Lonely Doug: The Story of One of Canada’s Last Great Trees
Harley Rustad - 2018
He came across a massive Douglas fir the height of a twenty-storey building. Instead of allowing the tree to be felled, he tied a ribbon around the trunk, bearing the words “Leave Tree.” The forest was cut but the tree was saved. The solitary Douglas fir, soon known as Big Lonely Doug, controversially became the symbol of environmental activists and their fight to protect the region’s dwindling old-growth forests.Originally featured as a long-form article in The Walrus that garnered a National Magazine Award (Silver), Big Lonely Doug weaves the ecology of old-growth forests, the legend of the West Coast’s big trees, the turbulence of the logging industry, the fight for preservation, the contention surrounding ecotourism, First Nations land and resource rights, and the fraught future of these ancient forests around the story of a logger who saved one of Canada's last great trees.
The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations On Cotton And Slavery In The American Slave States, 1853-1861
Frederick Law Olmsted - 1861
and wrote one of the most important pro-abolition discourses. The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people; the inadequacies of the plantation system; and the economic consequences and problems associated with America’s most “peculiar institution”. Disproving the opinion that “Cotton is king”, Olmsted examined the huge differences between the economies of the northern and southern states, contrasting the more successful, wealthy and progressive north with the stubborn south, convinced of the necessity of slavery. Hailed as one of the most convincing and influential anti-slavery arguments, Olmsted’s work was widely praised with London’s Westminster Review declaring, “it is impossible to resist his accumulated evidence.” Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture. Through his work as a journalist for the New York Daily Times (New York Times), he became interested in the adverse economic effects of slavery and The Cotton Kingdom is a result of this. He died in 1903.
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track
Thomas E. Mann - 2006
Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, but now it is a broken branch, damaged by partisan bickering and internal rancor. The Broken Branch offers both a brilliant diagnosis of the cause of Congressional decline and a much-needed blueprint for change, from two experts who understand politics and revere our institutions, but believe that Congress has become deeply dysfunctional. Mann and Ornstein, two of the nations most renowned and judicious scholars of government and politics, bring to light the historical roots of Congress's current maladies, examining 40 years of uninterrupted Democratic control of the House and the stunning midterm election victory of 1994 that propelled Republicans into the majority in both House and Senate. The byproduct of that long and grueling but ultimately successful Republican campaign, the authors reveal, was a weakened institution bitterly divided between the parties. They highlight the dramatic shift in Congress from a highly decentralized, committee-based institution into a much more regimented one in which party increasingly trumps committee. The resultant changes in the policy process--the demise of regular order, the decline of deliberation, and the weakening of our system of checks and balances--have all compromised the role of Congress in the American Constitutional system. Indeed, Speaker Dennis Hastert has unabashedly stated that his primary responsibility is to pass the president's legislative program--identifying himself more as a lieutenant of the president than a steward of the house. From tax cuts to the war against Saddam Hussein to a Medicare prescription drug benefit, the legislative process has been bent to serve immediate presidential interests and have often resulted in poorly crafted and stealthily passed laws. Strong majority leadership in Congress, the authors conclude, led not to a vigorous exertion of congressional authority but to a general passivity in the face of executive power. A vivid portrait of an institution that has fallen far from the aspirations of our Founding Fathers, The Broken Branch highlights the costs of a malfunctioning Congress to national policymaking, and outlines what must be done to repair the damage.
Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place
Coll Thrush - 2007
Indians appear at the time of contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities-and thus Indian and urban histories-are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and in what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native.On the urban indigenous frontier of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, Indians were central to town life. Native Americans literally made Seattle possible through their labor and their participation, even as they were made scapegoats for urban disorder. As late as 1880, Seattle was still very much a Native place. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, however, Seattle's urban and Indian histories were transformed as the town turned into a metropolis. Massive changes in the urban environment dramatically affected indigenous people's abilities to survive in traditional places. The movement of Native people and their material culture to Seattle from all across the region inspired new identities both for the migrants and for the city itself. As boosters, historians, and pioneers tried to explain Seattle's historical trajectory, they told stories about Indians: as hostile enemies, as exotic Others, and as noble symbols of a vanished wilderness. But by the beginning of World War II, a new multitribal urban Native community had begun to take shape in Seattle, even as it was overshadowed by the city's appropriation of Indian images to understand and sell itself.After World War II, more changes in the city, combined with the agency of Native people, led to a new visibility and authority for Indians in Seattle. The descendants of Seattle's indigenous peoples capitalized on broader historical revisionism to claim new authority over urban places and narratives. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Native people have returned to the center of civic life, not as contrived symbols of a whitewashed past but on their own terms.In Seattle, the strands of urban and Indian history have always been intertwined. Including an atlas of indigenous Seattle created with linguist Nile Thompson, Native Seattle is a new kind of urban Indian history, a book with implications that reach far beyond the region.Replaced by ISBN 9780295741345
The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions: Straight Advice on Essays, Résumés, Interviews, and More
Anna Ivey - 2005
In this book-the first of its kind by a former law school admissions officer-she draws on her expertise to cover topics from the application and the essay to the interview and the recommendations, touching on hot-button issues like how much the LSAT, ethnicity, and age really matter. Offering an insider's advice on how to produce the very best application, this guide gives straight answers to questions such as: • What kind of essay should I write to set me apart from the rest of the pack?• Should I explain my low LSAT score, my D in chemistry, my attention deficit disorder, my time in rehab? • Is law school worth the debt I'll face when I graduate? Full of invaluable examples and anecdotes about real admissions decisions, The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions is certain to become the new bible for would-be law students everywhere.
A Knock on the Door: The Essential History of Residential Schools from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada - 2015
It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer.” So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC provided opportunities for individuals, families, and communities to share their experiences of residential schools and released several reports based on 7000 survivor statements and five million documents from government, churches, and schools, as well as a solid grounding in secondary sources.A Knock on the Door, published in collaboration with the National Research Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, gathers material from the several reports the TRC has produced to present the essential history and legacy of residential schools in a concise and accessible package that includes new materials to help inform and contextualize the journey to reconciliation that Canadians are now embarked upon.Survivor and former National Chief of the Assembly First Nations, Phil Fontaine, provides a Foreword, and an Afterword introduces the holdings and opportunities of the National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, home to the archive of recordings, and documents collected by the TRC.As Aimée Craft writes in the Afterword, knowing the historical backdrop of residential schooling and its legacy is essential to the work of reconciliation. In the past, agents of the Canadian state knocked on the doors of Indigenous families to take the children to school. Now, the Survivors have shared their truths and knocked back. It is time for Canadians to open the door to mutual understanding, respect, and reconciliation.
The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies
Alan Taylor - 2010
During the early nineteenth century, Britons and Americans renewed their struggle over the legacy of the American Revolution. Soldiers, immigrants, settlers, and Indians fought in a northern borderland to determine the fate of a continent. Would revolutionary republicanism sweep the British from Canada? Or would the British empire contain, divide, and ruin the shaky American republic?In a world of double identities, slippery allegiances, and porous boundaries, the leaders of the republic and of the empire struggled to control their own diverse peoples. The border divided Americans—former Loyalists and Patriots—who fought on both sides in the new war, as did native peoples defending their homelands. Serving in both armies, Irish immigrants battled one another, reaping charges of rebellion and treason. And dissident Americans flirted with secession while aiding the British as smugglers and spies.During the war, both sides struggled to sustain armies in a northern land of immense forests, vast lakes, and stark seasonal swings in the weather. In that environment, many soldiers panicked as they fought their own vivid imaginations, which cast Indians as bloodthirsty savages. After fighting each other to a standstill, the Americans and the British concluded that they could safely share the continent along a border that favored the United States at the expense of Canadians and Indians. Both sides then celebrated victory by forgetting their losses and by betraying the native peoples.A vivid narrative of an often brutal (and sometimes comic) war that reveals much about the tangled origins of the United States and Canada.
The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates
Ralph Louis Ketcham - 1986
Edited and introduced by Ralph Ketcham.
Lawless: A lawyer's unrelenting fight for justice in one of the world's most dangerous places
Kimberley Motley - 2019
She was 32 years old at the time, a former Mrs. Wisconsin (she'd entered the contest on a dare) and a mother of three who had never travelled outside the United States. What she brought to Afghanistan was a toughness and resilience which came from growing up in the projects in one of the most dangerous cities in America, a fundamental belief in everyone's right to justice - whether you live in Milwaukee, New York or Kabul - and a kick-ass approach to practising law that has made her a legend in the archaic, misogynistic and deeply conservative environment of Afghanistan. Through sheer force of personality, ingenuity and perseverance, Kimberley became the first foreign lawyer to practise in the courts of Afghanistan. Her legal work swiftly morphed into a personal mission - to bring "justness" to the defenceless and voiceless.In the space of two years, Kimberley established herself as an expert on Afghanistan's fledgling criminal justice system, steeped in the country's complex laws but equally adept at wielding religious law in the defence of her clients. Her radical approach has seen her successfully represent both Afghans and Westerners, overturning sentences for men and women who have become subject to often appalling miscarriages of justice. Kimberley's story is both the memoir of an extraordinary woman fighting in one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and a page-turning non-fiction legal thriller.
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
Ira Katznelson - 2013
Ira Katznelson, “a towering figure in the study of American and European history” (Cornel West), boldly asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who safeguarded racial segregation as they built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power. This original study brings to vivid life the politicians and pundits of the time, including Walter Lippmann, who argued that America needed a dose of dictatorship; Mississippi’s five-foot-two Senator Theodore Bilbo, who advocated the legal separation of races; and Robert Oppenheimer, who built the atomic bomb yet was tragically undone by the nation’s hysteria. Fear Itself is a necessary work, vital to understanding our world—a world the New Deal first made.
The Right To Vote The Contested History Of Democracy In The United States
Alexander Keyssar - 2000
But the history of suffrage in the U.S. is, in fact,the story of a struggle to achieve this right by our society's marginalized groups. In The Right to Vote, Duke historian Alexander Keyssar explores the evolution of suffrage over the course of the nation's history. Examining the many features of the history of the right to vote in the U.S.—class, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, and age—the book explores the conditions under which American democracy has expanded and contracted over the years.Keyssar presents convincing evidence that the history of the right to vote has not been one of a steady history of expansion and increasing inclusion, noting that voting rights contracted substantially in the U.S. between 1850 and 1920. Keyssar also presents a controversial thesis: that the primary factor promoting the expansion of the suffrage has been war and the primary factors promoting contraction or delaying expansion have been class tension and class conflict.