How America was shaped

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Just in time for today's 236th anniversary of American independence, the Library of Congress has opened an exhibition that explores the forging of the culture of the nation.
"Books That Shaped America" will run through September 29 at the library's Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street S.E. For those who can't make it to Washington, the exhibit's list is available online here. The library welcomes comments, and nominations for books to add, here.
The inaugural list, which contains books published as early as 1751 and as recently as 2002, has much merit.
Authors honored include women as well as men, and are not limited to writers of fiction. On the list as well as the novel are the schoolbook and the cookbook, the epic poem and the expedition log, the autobiography and the adventure story.  Even a road atlas.
As a list of what shaped America, though, it has a glaring omission:
Books by non-Americans.

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Seems unlikely that this is the library's subliminal comment on the American strain of isolationism. It is equally unlikely, though, that the listmakers meant to say that nothing published outside the United States affected the United States. The latter group of books helped Americans, as the Scottish poet Robert Burns put it, "To see oursels as ithers see us!"
A few examples:
► Works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels erected an ideological framework that existed in opposition to, and so helped to etch the identity of, American political economy.
► Not only did litigation over James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) create a legal opening for freer expression within the United States, but the work itself helped American authors to free their own creativity.

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► For many Americans, The Diary of a Young Girl, as the 1952 U.S. edition was titled, is the touchstone account of the horrors of the Holocaust. It first was published in Dutch, as Het Achterhuis, 2 years after the 1945 death of its author, Anne Frank, at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
Thus even as we celebrate Library of Congress recognition of our favorite books -- including ones by IntLawGrrls foremothers Betty Friedan (Feminine Mystique, 1963) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) -- we look forward to a richer, more global list of books that shaped America.

A Women's Independence Day

It will come as no surprise that suffragists in the United States claimed this date -- the anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence -- as their own.
It's well known that in the months before that declaration issued, Abigail Adams pressed drafters to "Remember the Ladies." Neither her husband John nor the principal drafter, Thomas Jefferson, heeded her plea.
Also well known: campaigners for women's rights modeled the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments after the 1776 document.
Less known but worth noting is the role Independence Day played in a 1909 campaign for women's suffrage in Washington.
As detailed in this 2008 essay by Paula Becker, campaigners in that Pacific Northwest state preferred a low-key approach -- the "so-called 'still hunt' strategy"-- to the in-your-face militancy of the Pankhursts and other British suffragists.
A centerpiece of this strategy was the Washington Women's Cookbook (1909), sold door-to-door as a way personally to lobby women in order that they might persuade their husbands, fathers, and sons to vote to grant women the vote. (photo credit)
Then, during the 1st week in July 1909, activists from across the country arrived in Seattle -- many by a train dubbed the Suffrage Special (credit for above right depiction) -- to hold a suffrage convention alongside AYP, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the state's 1st World's Fair.
On the 4th of July, a Sunday, famous suffrage leaders took to the pulpit to spread "the gospel of woman suffrage," Becker wrote. They included several subjects of prior IntLawGrrls posts -- Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Florence Kelley, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- and others, like Pauline Steinem, who blazed a feminist path that her granddaughter Gloria would follow.
Days after this spate of sermonizing, the convention ended with July 7 "Suffrage Day" fesitivities at the AYP Fair itself. (photo credit)
As a consequence of these and other campaign activities, the male electorate approved suffrage on November 8, 1910. Thus did women in Washington eventually win a measure of independence.

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'[W]hat you are suggesting is that the courts who created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons, and there could be an argument made that that was the Court's error to start with, ... the fact that the Court imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics.'

-- Sonia Sotomayor (above right), posing the question that appears at page 33 of this transcript of the 1st oral argument in which she participated as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Here is audio of the September 9 argument in that campaign spending case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). Jess Bravin plumbed the possible implications of her query in this article in the Wall Street Journal (hat tip to SCOTUSblog); he further observed that "Sotomayor may have found a like mind in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg" (below left), who evoked the American Declaration of Independence when she said, even earlier in the argument (transcript p. 4):

'A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights.'

Ways that any rethinking of the legal personality of the corporation might affect subfields of international law -- in particular, the field of corporate responsibility -- deserve pondering.

On November 19

On this day in ...
... 1863 (145 years ago today), with the War Between the States still raging, a national cemetery was dedicated at a Pennsylvania battlefield where 4 months earlier 51,000 had perished in a 3-day battle. One speech immediately printed in full on the front page of The New York Times -- the Gettsyburg Address of President Abraham Lincoln -- resounds in American literature to this day. (Aside to constitutional law buffs: the speech's famous opening equation dates the birth of the United States to the Declaration of Independence, and not to the ratification of the Constitution.)
Given the affinity of President-Elect Barack Obama for Lincoln's writings, it seems appropriate to reprint the address in full, accompanied by the only known photo of Lincoln, shown hatless and with head bowed just after having spoken:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Remembrance of Independence Days Past

(IntLawGrrls honors this 232d anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with these relics from 4th of July celebrations past, all courtesy of the Libary of Congress' American Memory collection)





















Bonneted women sit in an automobile decorated by the Benevolent Protective Order of the Elks for the 4th of July parade in Ouray, Colorado, ca. 1910-1914 (photo credit)







Woman identified as "lady aeronaut Mrs. E. Ihling" at a 4th of July balloon race in Chicago, 1908. Lizzie Ihling's ballooning exploits were famous; see too here. (photo credit)

























Above, toddlers Ernestine Block and Alberta Metzler sit in their prams, decked in 4th of July bunting, 1897, Crested Butte, Colorado. (photo credit)






















Above, sharecroppers' children gather food for "their 4th of July celebration, whites and blacks together," 1936, Hill House, Mississippi. (credit for photo by Dorothea Lange) Below, young women raise hands, each claiming to have won the 4th of July potato race, 1914, Keota, Weld County, Colorado. (credit for photo by Clyde L. Stanley)

On September 2, ...

... 1945, nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh, in Ba Dinh Square, Hanoi (left), proclaimed the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It began by quoting language familiar to all students of the U.S. Declaration of 1776: "'All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.'" It continued with a reference to France's Declaration of the Rights of Man, then proceeded to condemn abuses by "the French imperialists" who wished to continue rule in Vietnam. For another 3 decades Ho's supporters would fight, 1st the French and then the Americans (in a war that President George W. Bush has cited, controversially, as a cautionary tale against U.S. troop withdawal from Iraq).

... 1990, having attained the ratification or accession of 20 U.N. member states, the Convention on the Rights of the Child entered into force. Today it has near-universal state party membership; the United States is almost the lone exception. The United States has ratified both the Optional Protocols to the Convention, however: 1 deals with sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography; the other, involvement of children in armed conflict. Moreover, as explored here, the Convention itself became a key source of consultation in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 decision invalidating the juvenile death penalty in Roper v. Simmons.

On July 19, ...

... 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (pictured at left with 1 of her daughters, Harriot) read aloud a Declaration of Sentiments at a Seneca Falls, N.Y., women's rights convention. The following day delegates unanimously adopted the 1848 Declaration -- the text of which parallels the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, and so includes phrasing such as, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal ..."
... 1980, the XXII Olympic Games opened in Moscow with a record-low number of countries participating, as scores of countries joined a boycott called by U.S. President Jimmy Carter to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

'Remember the Ladies'

As the United States celebrates the Declaration of Independence proclaimed 231 years ago, we pay homage to a Revolutionary woman, Abigail Adams (left). She managed the household in Braintree, Massachusetts, while her husband John, who would become the United States' 2d President, worked at politics and diplomacy; indeed, she accompanied him abroad to diplomatic posts in Paris and London. In 1825 she gave birth to their son, John Quincy, who would be the United States' 8th Secretary of State and 6th President.

Abigail is renowned for urging her husband, in a letter written March 31, 1776, just months before the Declaration, "Remember the Ladies":

...-I long to hear that you have declared an independancy-and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.
Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness.
....
Adieu. I need not say how much I am Your ever faithfull Friend.

Alas, John replied as if she'd written in jest. It would require the work of generations before the equality Abigail Adams sought could be realized.

On July 4, ...

...1954, the BBC reported: "Housewives celebrate end of rationing." That day, 12 years' enforced scarcity of staples, begun during World War II, came to a close. The headline prompts a wee tribute to my late mother-in-law, Margaret Mary Kerlin O'Neill, a legend for her skill in stowing foodstuffs in her undergarments in order to get them across the Irish border and home to Derry City, then, as now, under British rule. Butter is said to have posed particular difficulties. (photo courtesy of the BBC)
... 1884, the 108th anniversary of the proclamation in Philadelphia of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, a statue named "Liberty Enlightening the World" was formally presented to a U.S. diplomat at a ceremony in Paris. A contemporary account described this Statue of Liberty as a "great artistic monument, the gift of France, to which have contribut­ed by their votes 180 cities, forty general councils, a large number of chambers of commerce and of societies, and over a hundred thousand subscribers."