American Legal History

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ChrisProject 14 - 07 Jan 2010 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Regulators of North Carolina

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 -- ChrisFasano - 22 Dec 2009
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  • This is a relatively self-contained mini-thesis, the sort of work that would make a fine undergraduate history thesis, or a good run of exercise for a graduate student. I think the judgments offered are a little captious. It may seem easy to dismiss, for example, what you apparently regard as stereotypical Marxisé analysis by Marvin Kay, though it's fine of the form, but to say that you're not writing about class warfare because it is only the war of debtors against creditors and not the war of the poor against the rich strikes me as faintly absurd.

  • But I think the real problem for me is that this is not a project from which the reader can learn how historical questions are answered. Your mode of construction is so evidently to read the secondary sources, find and scan the sources the secondaries cite, and then rewrite those sources into a new narrative that tries to ascribe excellence or error to the secondaries from which you began. Precisely because this mode depends on the writers of the secondaries having exhaustively plumbed primary sources in order to write up their broad-gauge narratives, the real methods by which history is done are fundamentally concealed among the trees upstream. Perhaps actually asking a legal history question would have helped. For example: Who was criminally prosecuted as a result of these events, what were the charges brought, and how were they tried?
 
 
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Revision 14r14 - 07 Jan 2010 - 00:57:33 - EbenMoglen
Revision 13r13 - 22 Dec 2009 - 08:15:25 - ChrisFasano
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