Books by "William Alfred Peffer"
5 books found
For half a century before 1937, populists, progressives, and labor leaders complained bitterly that a "judicial oligarchy" impeded social and economic reform by imposing crippling restraints on trade unions and nullifying legislation that regulated business corporations. A Muted Fury, the first study of this neglected chapter in American political and legal history, explains the origins of hostility toward the courts during the Progressive Era, examines in detail the many measures that antagonists of the judiciary proposed for the curtailment of judicial power, and evaluates the successes and failures of the anti-court movements. Tapping a broad array of sources, including popular literature and unpublished manuscripts, William Ross demonstrates that this widespread fury against the judiciary was muted by many factors, including respect for judicial power, internal divisions among the judiciary's critics, institutional obstacles to reform, and the judiciary's own willingness to mitigate its hostility toward progressive legislation and labor. Ross argues that persistent criticism of the courts influenced judicial behavior, even though the antagonists of the courts failed in their many efforts to curb judicial power. The book's interdisciplinary exploration of the complex interactions among politics, public opinion, judicial decision-making, the legislative process, and the activities of organized interest groups provides fresh insights into the perennial controversy over the scope of judicial power in America. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe
Authorized by Congress in 1889, the Cherokee Commission was formed to negotiate the purchase of huge areas of land from the Cherokees, Ioways, Pawnees, Poncas, Tonakawas, Wichitas, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Sac and Fox, and other tribes in Indian Territory. Some humanitarian reformers argued that dissolving tribal holdings into individual private properties would help “civilize” the Indians and speed their assimilation into American culture. Whatever the hoped-for effects, the coerced sales opened to white settlement the vast “unused” expanses of land that had been held communally by the tribes. In Taking Indian Lands, William T. Hagan presents a detailed and disturbing account of the deliberations between the Cherokee Commission and the tribes. Often called the Jerome Commission after its leading negotiator, David H. Jerome, the commission intimidated Indians into first accepting allotment in severalty and then selling to the United States, at it price, the fifteen million acres declared surplus after allotment. This land then went to white settlers, making possible the state of Oklahoma at the expense of the Indian tribes who had held claim to it. Hagan has mined nearly two thousand pages of commission journals in the National Archives to reveal the commissioners’ dramatic rhetoric and strategies and the Indian responses. He also records the words of tribal leaders as they poignantly defended their attachment to the land and expressed their fears of how their lives would be changed.