The Tree of Liberty: A Documentary History of Rebellion and Political Crime in America - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801858127 ISBN 13: 9780801858123

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Benedict Arnold and Cesar Chavez, John Wilkes Booth and Martin Luther King, Sirhan Sirhan, the Berrigans, the Founding Fathers, and the suffragists -- all have engaged in political behavior defined at one time or another as "criminal." Though the fire and fury of some of these names have been dimmed by the passage of time, their protest, civil disobedience, and even rebellion are refreshed in every American generation. Now revised and expanded, this widely praised and monumental work (awarded "Best Book in Law" by the Association of American Publishers) chronicles the uninterrupted and ongoing story of dissent, disobedience, violence, and rebellion in America, from the colonial era to the Oklahoma City bombing. New to this edition are documents dealing with acts that again challenge the limits of acceptable rebellion -- documents relating to such topics as the Iran-Contra affair, the Waco siege, the capture of Manuel Noriega, church arson, the struggle for cyberspace, the Republic of Texas, and the Unabomber.

Political criminals are as diverse as American society and history. They are not always violent, and some are not even activists. Their crimes might be merely failing to perform legal duties, such as swearing allegiance to the nation or ignoring the draft. They may active protestors, refusing to send their children to public school, proclaiming their independence from the United States, taking on the Ku Klux Klan or bombing abortion clinics. Even entire groups of people, such as the Cherokees in the 1830s, the Japanese-Americans during World War II, or Latin immigrants in the 1990s, can be treated as criminals, their property seized and their liberty denied. The rights of women to vote and workers to strike, taken for granted today, have their roots in acts that the state once prosecuted. Echoes of these past struggles may resound today in fights for prayer in school and for animal rights.

Available as a single hardcover or in two paperback volumes (the first ranging from colonial times through World War II, and the second dealing with the Cold War era to the New World Order), The Tree of Liberty focuses on these and other issues in documents that span an extraordinary range. Supreme Court decisions and newspaper accounts, presidential proclamations and anarchist flyers, speeches, trial transcripts, diaries, letters, laws, media broadcasts, and Internet postings -- the more than 400 documents in The Tree of Liberty forcefully demonstrate how challenges to government and authority have shaped the nation's thought, history, and freedom. An introductory note places each document in its historical context. Taken together, these headnotes constitute a narrative history of dissent in the United States. The book's full concordance enables readers to trace the development of specific issues -- terrorism or states' rights, civil disobedience or assassination, through the country's past and present.

About this title

Review:

If, as Thomas Jefferson noted, "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing," The Tree of Liberty must be superb. This comprehensive collection of documents related to "rebellion and political crime in America" begins with numerous documents from the colonial period and proceeds right up to present-day battles over free speech in cyberspace. Along with source documents such as the Mayflower Compact and Thomas Paine's Common Sense, The Tree of Liberty also publishes a staggering array of letters and other personal accounts, newspaper stories, and court decisions related to dissent, disobedience, and rebellion. The editors deserve credit not only for providing many standard pieces of source material but for also delving deeply and dredging up material related to many events that, while highly controversial when they happened, are not well remembered today, such as the court decisions pertaining to the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs for his part in an 1894 railroad strike, and the jailhouse letters and the final court statement of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who was hanged in 1927, along with fellow Italian-born anarchist Nicola Sacco, for a crime that evidence has always suggested they did not commit. This is an often surprising collection of material related to those who, for better or worse, marched to a different drum. --Robert McNamara

Book Description:

A revised and expanded edition of a classic history of rebels and rebellion. "This is not a book. It is a feast." -- Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

About this edition

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0801858127
• ISBN 13: 9780801858123
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 896
• Editor: Nicholas N. Kittrie, Eldon D. Wedlock Jr.