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Book Cover
Book
Author Welke, Barbara Young, 1958-

Title Recasting American liberty : gender, race, law, and the railroad revolution, 1865-1920 / Barbara Young Welke
Published Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2001

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'PONDS  323.440973 Wel/Ral  AVAILABLE
Description xx, 405 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Series Cambridge historical studies in American law and society
Cambridge historical studies in American law and society.
Contents Machine derived contents note: Part I. The Body: Accidental Injury: 1. The railway journey (i): the technological transformation -- 2. Gendered journeys (i): physical vulnerability -- 3. The law of accidental injury -- Junction: pain and suffering -- Part II. Mind and Body: Nervous Shock: 4. The railway journey (ii): the psychological transformation -- 5. Gendered journeys (ii): psychological vulnerability -- 6. The law of nervous shock -- Junction: truth, legal storytelling, and the performance of injury -- Part III. Person: Racial Segregation: 7. The Railway journey (iii): the spatial transformation -- 8. Gendered journeys (iii): status vulnerability -- 9. The law of racial segregation
Summary "Recasting American Liberty offers a dramatic reconsideration of how Americans' encounter on railroads and streetcars with corporate power, dangerous technologies, and modernized space reshaped both law and broader cultural assumptions about the relative obligations of individuals, corporate actors, and the state in safeguarding individual liberty in everyday life. The three-part narrative, focusing on the law of accidental injury, nervous shock, and racial segregation, captures Americans' gendered journey from a cultural and legal ethos celebrating manly independence and autonomy to one that recognized and sought to protect the individual against the vulnerability and lack of control characteristic of modern life." "At the book's heart are personal stories - men forced to jump from moving trains when trainmen refused to stop for men to alight, men and women emotionally wrecked from the trauma of a near-miss, black women barred from first-class ladies' cars because of their race, white women traumatized by a black man's presence in the car. Their stories and the law's response to them alter fundamentally how we understand the construction of law as well as how we understand the conditions of liberty at the dawn of the twentieth century."--Jacket
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Subject Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States -- History.
African Americans -- History -- Legal status, laws, etc.
Railroads and state -- United States -- History.
African Americans -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- History.
Law -- United States -- History.
Discrimination -- Law and legislation -- United States -- History.
SUBJECT United States -- History -- 1865-1921. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140284
LC no. 00067435
ISBN 0521649668 paperback
0521640202 cased