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ISBN

9781479869619

Publication Date

August 2019

Price

$39.00

Publisher

New York University Press

Abstract

Kelly Ryan’s Everyday Crimes provides perhaps the most in-depth study to date of violence against legally-dependent people in early America. Focusing on the legal experiences these oft-abused groups – married white women, enslaved and free blacks, and young servants and apprentices – from the colonial period to the Jeffersonian era, Ryan argues that, through direct action to draw attention to cruelty and resist violence in their everyday lives, these individuals brought about a shift in cultural and legal norms. As a result, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, a tradition of defending vulnerable populations had emerged which, while it did not eliminate or even reduce the preponderance of violence against vulnerable people, nevertheless gave these people many more options to 0btain both legal and extra-legal redress for their suffering and laid the groundwork for future breakthroughs in human rights...

DOI

10.31390/cwbr.22.2.13

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