Winner of a 1988 Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association
Richard Polenberg is Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author of Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales That Inspired "Stagolee," "John Henry," and Other Traditional American Folk Songs and Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, The Supreme Court, and Free Speech, and is the editor of In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Security Clearance Hearing, all from Cornell.
"A book crowded with intense, stubborn, vulnerable, idealistic, and mean-spirited people... The kind of social legal history Dickens might have enjoyed."-Nat Hentoff, Washington Post Book World "A marvelous ... book that brings the people and the law to life... It teaches us again, dramatically, that our Constitution lives because judges apply its eternal principles in the light of accumulated experience and wisdom."-Anthony Lewis, The New York Times "Polenberg's abridgement is a successful distillation of the original sprawling transcript into a lean form that focuses our attention to acute questions of national loyalty and security, morality, ethics, politics, and human frailty."-Ellen Bales, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 33:2
No scholar has examined the 1919 Abrams caseabout denial of civil liberties during the Red scare afterWorld War Iin comparable depth and as subtly. Polenberg discusses the district and Supreme Court decisions; the five anarchist defendants; the New York City bomb squad; Judge Henry Clayton; prosecution and defense attorneys; J. Edgar Hoover; justices and legal scholars; and wardens and inmates in the prisons that briefly held the prisoners. Comparison of Soviet and U.S. treatment of anarchists adds a rich dimension. Massive learning and exacting scholarship make this essential reading for students of modern American law and history. Milton Cantor, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst
"A book crowded with intense, stubborn, vulnerable, idealistic, and mean-spirited people... The kind of social legal history Dickens might have enjoyed."-Nat Hentoff, Washington Post Book World "A marvelous ... book that brings the people and the law to life... It teaches us again, dramatically, that our Constitution lives because judges apply its eternal principles in the light of accumulated experience and wisdom."-Anthony Lewis, The New York Times "Polenberg's abridgement is a successful distillation of the original sprawling transcript into a lean form that focuses our attention to acute questions of national loyalty and security, morality, ethics, politics, and human frailty."-Ellen Bales, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 33:2
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