(Source: University Press of Kansas)
The University
Press of Kansas is publishing a new book on “Critical legal histories of the
North American West”.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In the American
imagination “the West” denotes a border—between civilization and wilderness,
past and future, native and newcomer—and its lawlessness is legendary. In fact,
there was an abundance of law in the West, as in all borderland regions of
vying and overlapping claims, jurisdictions, and domains. It is this legal
borderland that Beyond the Borders of the Law explores. Combining the concepts
and insights of critical legal studies and western/borderlands history, this
book demonstrates how profoundly the North American West has been, and
continues to be, a site of contradictory, overlapping, and overreaching legal
structures and practices steeped in articulations of race, gender, and power.
The authors in
this volume take up topics and time periods that include Native history, the
US-Canada and US-Mexico borders, regions from Texas to Alaska and Montana to
California, and a chronology that stretches from the mid-nineteenth century to
the near-present. From water rights to women’s rights, from immigrant to
indigenous histories, from disputes over coal deposits to child custody, their
essays chronicle the ways in which marginalized westerners have leveraged and
resisted the law to define their own rights and legacies. For the authors,
legal borderlands might be the legal texts that define and regulate
geopolitical borders, or they might be the ambiguities or contradictions
creating liminal zones within the law. In their essays, and in the volume as a
whole, the concept of legal borderlands proves a remarkably useful framework
for finally bringing a measure of clarity to a region characterized by lawful
disorder and contradiction.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Katrina
Jagodinsky is associate professor of history at the University of
Nebraska–Lincoln. She is the author of Legal Codes and Talking Trees:
Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands,
1854–1946.
Pablo Mitchell
is professor of history at Oberlin College. He is the author of Coyote Nation:
Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880–1920, which won
the Organization of American Historians’ Ray Allen Billington Prize in 2007.
More information here
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