Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 [Paperback]

With the keen judgment for which she is so well known within law and society circles, Barbara Young Welke has produced a compelling and engaging work centering on the restructuring of the notions of liberty in the American polity from the end of the Civil War to the Progressive Era that will attract a wide audience. "The era of steadfast commitment to American ingenuity and independence," according to Welke, "was replaced by the era of ordered liberty, liberty assured through restraint" (4). It was through the injuries that women often suffered alighting from trains and streetcars that "the transition from an outmoded ethos of a nation of free men to one that recognized the reality of human vulnerability" occurred (124). Those familiar with her seminal articles, "When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855-1914" (winner of the ASLH Surrency Prize) and "Unreasonable Women: Gender and the Law of Accidental Injury, 1870-1920" will be deeply satisfied with this monograph that couples her earlier analysis of gender, race, and class with the development of the modern regulatory movement. Thoughtfully argued and gracefully written, Recasting American Liberty is a valuable contribution to the Cambridge University Press Historical Studies in American Law and Society series which includes works from many outstanding scholars such as Tony Freyer, Andrew Cohen, Michael Grossberg, and David Rabban. Welke's analysis forces the historical community to reconsider the ordering of social relations, institutions, individual identity, and power arrangements within American society. As Welke notes, "Railroads and streetcars transformed accidental injury from unconnected, individual events into a shared American experience, a shared discourse of injury, suffering, and human vulnerability" (80). Welke brings historical depth and philosophical perspective to her narrative and, as a result, truly furthers the understanding of the law of accidental injury, the law of nervous shock, and the law of racial segregation. The traditional subsidy and economic theories of tort law that dominate legal literature say little about "whether individual liberty was increased or decreased by the methods companies adopted to prevent alighting injuries: enclosed cars, gates, pneumatic doors, and limited, marked stops" (105). Recasting American Liberty thoroughly enriches the literature surrounding the impact of the railroads on American society.

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