Peter Charles Hoffer: 11 books
Prelude to Revolution
The Salem Gunpowder Raid of 1775
Language: English
Release Date: November 14, 2013
Before colonial Americans could declare independence, they had to undergo a change of heart. Beyond a desire to rebel against British mercantile and fiscal policies, they had to believe that they could stand up to the fully armed British soldier. Prelude to Revolution uncovers one story of how the...
When Benjamin Franklin Met the Reverend Whitefield
Enlightenment, Revival, and the Power of the Printed Word
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2011
In the 1740s, two quite different developments revolutionized Anglo-American life and thought—the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening. This book takes an encounter between the paragons of each movement—the printer and entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin and the British-born revivalist George Whitefield—as...
by Peter Charles Hoffer
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Over the past half-century, historians have greatly enriched our understanding of America's past, broadening their fields of inquiry from such traditional topics as politics and war to include the agency of class, race, ethnicity, and gender and to focus on the lives of ordinary men and women. We...
The Clamor of Lawyers
The American Revolution and Crisis in the Legal Profession
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2018
The Clamor of Lawyers explores a series of extended public pronouncements that British North American colonial lawyers crafted between 1761 and 1776. Most, though not all, were composed outside of the courtroom and detached from on-going litigation. While they have been studied as political theory,...
by Peter Charles Hoffer
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2008
How do we know what happened in the past? We cannot go back, and no amount of historical data can enable us to understand with absolute certainty what life was like “then.” It is easy to demolish the very idea of historical knowing, but it is impossible to demolish the importance of historical...
Clio among the Muses
Essays on History and the Humanities
Language: English
Release Date: December 9, 2013
History helps us understand change, provides clues to our own identity, and hones our moral sense. But history is not a stand-alone discipline. Indeed, its own history is incomplete without recognition of its debt to its companions in the humane and social sciences. In Clio among the Muses, noted...
Rutgers v. Waddington
Alexander Hamilton, the End of the War for Independence, and the Origins of Judicial Review
Language: English
Release Date: February 12, 2016
Once the dust of the Revolution settled, the problem of reconciling the erstwhile warring factions arose, and as is often the case in the aftermath of violent revolutions, the matter made its way into the legal arena. Rutgers v. Waddington was such a case. Through this little-known but remarkable...
The Law's Conscience
Equitable Constitutionalism in America
Language: English
Release Date: November 9, 2000
The Law's Conscience is a history of equity in Anglo-American juris-prudence from the inception of the chancellor's court in medieval England to the recent civil rights and affirmative action decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Peter Hoffer argues that equity embodies a way of looking at...
The Supreme Court
An Essential History, Second Edition
Language: English
Release Date: September 28, 2018
For more than two centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court has provided a battleground for nearly every controversial issue in our nation’s history. Now a veteran team of talented historians—including the editors of the acclaimed Landmark Law Cases and American Society series—have updated the most...
The Search for Justice
Lawyers in the Civil Rights Revolution, 1950–1975
Language: English
Release Date: March 28, 2019
The civil rights era was a time of pervasive change in American political and social life. Among the decisive forces driving change were lawyers, who wielded the power of law to resolve competing concepts of order and equality and, in the end, to hold out the promise of a new and better nation.
The...
Past Imperfect
Facts, Fictions, Fraud American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and
Language: English
Release Date: July 3, 2007
Woodrow Wilson, a practicing academic historian before he took to politics, defined the importance of history: "A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today." He, like many men of his generation, wanted to impose a version of America's founding identity:...