Chapter 16
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Cracking the Code

Gordon A. Martin revisits United States v. Lynd, the civil rights case that forever changed the South

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Most Americans are familiar with the landmark civil-rights case Brown v. Board of Education. Less known is United States v. Lynd, the 1962 trial that paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote is an account of the groundbreaking trial that put Hattiesburg, Mississippi, at the center of the civil-rights debate. Written by Gordon A. Martin, Jr., one of the Justice Department attorneys in the case, the book uses oral history, legal commentary, and first-person reportage to put readers on the front row of a trial that forever changed the nature of race relations in Mississippi and the South. 

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Rights and Revolutions

Historian Timothy S. Huebner discusses how a “culture of constitutionalism” shaped the Civil War era

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Liberty and Union, Rhodes College professor Timothy S. Huebner brings together an enormous body of scholarship on the secession crisis, Civil War, and Reconstruction, compelling us to reconsider what we think we know about the era.

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Arguing For Democracy

Vanderbilt philosophers Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse discuss their handbook for political disagreement

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Why We Argue (and How We Should), Vanderbilt University philosophy professors Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse set ground rules for the kind of productive, democratic disagreement that they say is fundamental to a civil life. 

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Nothing More Autobiographical

Lorrie Moore’s See What Can Be Done is a window into a lively mind

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: “Pick a thing up, study it, shake it, skip it across a still surface to see how much felt and lively life got baked into it,” writes Lorrie Moore in her collection, See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary.

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On Account of Sex

In The Woman’s Hour, Elaine Weiss dissects the battle for women’s right to vote

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Elaine Weiss’s The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote is a riveting history of the battle to secure voting rights for American women. 

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Europe’s Bloody Borderlands

Timothy Snyder talks with Chapter 16 about the peoples and territories trapped between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia during the 1930s and 1940s

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In the bestselling Bloodlands, which has been critically acclaimed and widely translated, Timothy Snyder argues that the systematic killings in the Nazi death camps were part of the same arc of violence as the mass starving inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviets in the 1930s and the extra-legal killings perpetrated by Germans and Russians alike during their occupation of Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. 

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