In Cross Examinations of Law and Literature Brook Thomas uses legal thought and legal practice as a lens through which to read some of the important fictions of antebellum America. The lens reflects both ways, and we learn as much about the literature in the context of contemporary legal concerns as we do about the legal ideologies that the fiction subverts or reveals. Successive chapters deal with Cooper's Pioneers and Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables (property law and the image of the judiciary), Melville's 'Benito Cereno' and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery), Melville's White Jacket, Pierre and 'Bartleby' (worker exploitation or wage slavery), ....
The involvement of Britain with the Americas from the earliest age of exploration to the present is examined in entries about politics, government, culture, wars, economy, religion, slavery, and sports. The entries include very specific incidents and locales—San Juan Archipelago, Aroostook War, Hay-Pauncefote treaties, and the Rush- Bagot Convention—as well as more general subjects, such as the Atlantic economy, the Cold War, Greece, Iran, Iraq, terrorism, and witchcraft.
Eyewitness: Civil War This illustrated history offers a stunning array of reproductions and photographs of the sites, people, and artifacts associated with the war. The book is divided into 29 two-page chapters covering such topics as the slavery debate, the election of 1860, raising armies, camp life, women during the war, Gettysburg, and the Confederacy surrender.
When Abraham Lincoln met the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe after the start of the American Civil War, he reportedly said to her: 'So you're the little lady whose book started this big war'. Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, is credited as fuelling the cause to abolish slavery in the northern half of the United States in direct response to its continuation in the South.
Vol. 9 No. 3 
