Jessica Lowe

Murder in the Shenandoah: Making Police Sovereign in Revolutionary Virginia

Jessica Grand. Lowe. Cambridge University Press (January 2019). Bachelor via Cambridge University Press and Amazon.

On July 4, 1791, the fifteenth anniversary of American Independence, John Crane, a descendant of prominent Virginian families, killed his neighbor's harvest worker. Murder in the Shenandoah traces the story of this early murder example as it entangled powerful Virginians and addressed the question that anybody in the state was heatedly debating: what would it hateful to have equality earlier the law – and a earth where 'law is rex'? Past retelling the story of the case, called Republic v. Crane, through the optics of its witnesses, families, fighters, victims, judges, and juries, Jessica Thou. Lowe reveals how revolutionary debates about justice gripped the new nation, transforming ideas about police force, penalisation, and popular regime.

Endorsements:

Accelerate praise: "In Murder in the Shenandoah, Jessica K. Lowe deftly investigates a deadly brawl to illuminate the legal civilization of the new nation's most influential state, shortly after the American Revolution. Filled with plot twists, surprising revelations, colorful characters, and rich insights, this book will reward anyone interested in the roots of American criminal constabulary." –Alan Taylor, author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804

Advance praise: "Elegantly written and copiously sourced, Jessica M. Lowe's volume is a must-read for specialists and students akin. Lowe upends the accepted notion that southerners went exterior the law to resolve conflicts because of the civilisation of honor that was inextricably embedded in slavery. She uses criminal police force to open up a window into social change in postrevolutionary Virginia and to prepare the stage for antebellum-era conflicts in imaginative and unexpected ways." –Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation

Accelerate praise: "Jessica One thousand. Lowe'due south beautifully crafted business relationship of murder and justice powerfully illuminates the reconstruction of criminal law in the early American commonwealth. Lowe skillfully turns the story of a single Virginia killing into a compelling meditation on how people, loftier and low, struggled over the pregnant of equality and the rule of law in the aftermath of revolution. A formidable piece of scholarship, Murder in the Shenandoah is also a jewel of historical narration and assay, at one time tough-minded and humane." –Sean Wilentz, author of The Rising of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

Advance praise: "Professor Lowe has produced a volume that is both a murder mystery and a mini-treatise on the history of criminal police force in colonial Virginia. Difficult-nosed legal history has seldom been presented in such fascinating, readable grade. Backside the legal story is an equally of import story of social change in early on Virginia. Lowe knows her Virginia law, and applies to it the questions of a modern historical sensibility. Readers volition be surprised and intrigued by this admirable book." –Stanley Katz, Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies

Accelerate praise: "In Jessica K. Lowe's poetic telling of a murder trial in the Shenandoah Valley on Independence Mean solar day in 1791, we see how issues of course, violence, and the rule of law came together to lead to the execution of a Virginia patrician. Lowe'southward beautifully written book shows the law in move. Wage workers, slaves, jurors, and the legal and planter elite all cross her stage equally the values of democracy made a new American law." –Alfred Fifty. Brophy, writer of University, Court, and Slave: Proslavery Thought in Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War

Near the Writer

Jessica Lowe

Jessica Lowe specializes in 18th- and 19th-century American legal history. She received her J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School in 2002; after police force school, she clerked in the District of Connecticut and on the U.Due south. Court of Appeals for the 4th Excursion. Lowe also practiced appellate law at Jones Day in Washington, D.C., where she worked on a number of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. She is admitted to practice in Virginia and the District of Columbia. Lowe received her B.A. (high honors) from the University of Virginia (1998). She then studied at Yale Divinity School (1999-2000), where she was a Marquand Scholar. Lowe received her Ph.D. in American history from Princeton University in 2014.  Her dissertation was awarded the St. George Tucker Lodge's Bradford Dissertation Prize for best Southern History dissertation.Murder in the Shenandoahis her starting time volume.

Lowe has held fellowships from, among others, the Andrew Due west. Mellon Foundation, the Princeton Academy Center for Human Values and the Center of Theological Enquiry (a Templeton Foundation grant), and participated in the 2013 Hurst Plant for Legal History at the University of Wisconsin. In 2011, she received the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Lowe teaches legal history, constitutional history, and classes in crime and punishment at the University of Virginia School of Police force. She is the founder of the interdisciplinary Legal History Writing Group, which brings together scholars from the Police, History, Politics and Religious Studies departments once monthly for breezy discussions of works in progress, and co-coordinates the Law Schoolhouse's Legal History Workshop series. In 2013, she co-organized a conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913). Lowe has also served equally a fellow at Brown College, the undergraduate residential college, and is a member of the Early on American Studies colloquium at the International Center for Jefferson Studies.

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