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Klappentext One of the academy's leading legal historians, William E. Nelson is the Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. For more than four decades, Nelson has produced some of the most original and creative work on American constitutional and legal history. His prize-winning books have blazed new trails for historians with their substantive arguments and the scope and depth of Nelson's exploration of primary sources. Nelson was the first legal scholar to use early American county court records as sources of legal and social history, and his work (on legal history in England, colonial America, and New York) has been a model for generations of legal historians. This book collects ten essays exemplifying and explaining the process of identifying and interpreting archival sources-the foundation of an array of methods of writing American legal history. The essays presented here span the full range of American history from the colonial era to the 1980s.Each historian has either identified a body of sources not previously explored or devised a new method of interrogating sources already known.The result is a kaleidoscopic examination of the historian's task and of the research methods and interpretative strategies that characterize the rich, complex field of American constitutional and legal history. "Over the past forty years, William Nelson has played a crucial role in the amazing growth of the field of legal history His significance comes in the first place from his prodigious scholarship. But as important have been the institutions he has founded and the young scholars he has nurtured. He has been and continues to be a model of the generous and creative senior scholar. The Golieb Fellowship at NYU School of Law, an institution he has long led, has offered a home to two generations of the best young legal historians, as they made transitions into distinguished careers. In the pages of Making Legal History, one finds a wonderful offering of some of their best work."-Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University Zusammenfassung A kaleidoscopic examination of the historian's task and of the research methods and interpretative strategies that characterize the rich! complex field of American constitutional and legal history. ...
