Norman L. Rosenberg

Hollywood on Trials: Courts and Films, 1930–1960

As long as legal scholarship focused on traditional sources that were considered “distinctively legal ,” a great variety of “legal texts” were consigned to scholars in other disciplines. Thus, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1932) and his classic work The Common Law (1881) appeared safely inside the categorical “box” identified as distinctively legal, while Louis Calherns portrayal of Holmes and the film The Magnificent Yankee (MGM, 1950) fell outside. In recent years, however, both the inside/outside distinction and the legal box metaphor have become increasingly suspect. Drawing upon post-structuralist theories, which highlight the discursive and representational dimensions of law, a variety of different projects seek to locate the diverse places at which legal rhetoric and imagery are constituted.

From Colonialism to Professionalism: The Public-Private Dynamic in United States Foreign Financial Advising, 1898–1929

Thoughout the twentieth century, North Americans have loaned money and given financial advice to capital-poor, less industrialized nations. Since World War II highly visible government agencies and multilateral bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have organized and extended much of this economic assistance. But from 1898 to the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s, North Americans experimented with other methods, especially nongovernmental ones, designed to bring financial order to so-called backward states. Such advisory efforts have received little systematic study: even basic information on pre-World War II financial advising has never been compiled, assessed, or interpreted. Although loan conditionalities and the role of foreign economic expertise loom as major, controversial issues in United States relations with Third World nations, little historical literature traces or explains previous financial advising relationships between non-European foreign nations and public and private institutions in the United States.1 This essay analyzes the forms that United States foreign financial advising took during the transitional period from 1898 to 1930, after territorial colonialism had ceased to seem a viable way of imposing financial arrangements, but before the advent of post-World War II international financial institutions. It focuses on Latin America in order to develop a structural framework for understanding the different

In our times : America since World War II

More concise, livelier, and broader in coverage than other similar volumes, this popular overview of American life since 1945 offers a clearly-written, authoritative interpretive narrative that pays special attention to major trends in foreign policy, mass culture, social history, gender, politics, civil rights, economics, and political culture. Organized both chronologically and topically, it provides balanced insights into all topics. KEY TOPICS: Integrates political, social, and cultural history -- demonstrating the ways in which different kinds of history blend together and provides a broad view of politics. Explores social history -- and ethnicity and gender -- in depth. Incorporates new scholarship on the Cold War Era -- including discussions on recently declassified materials. Takes account of new scholarship on civil rights, gender relationships, the 1960s, cultural history. For anyone interested in American history since 1945.