Reviews for Reflections on Constitutional Law

The average rating for Reflections on Constitutional Law based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-29 00:00:00 Matt Anderson A very good portrait of the Irish in the country from the original Scotch-Irish immigrants and early Catholics to the election of JFK. There are some interesting stories of some early settlers in Texas and in the Western part of the country that I had never heard of and made entertaining reading. A large emphasis of the book is on the modern Catholics in the Eastern cities like New York and Boston. The Tammany politcians are other late 19th century machine political machines are explained in great detail. Shannon seems to have an inate feel for the Irish-American experience and his periodic commentaries are insightful and original. He includes sections on notable Irish in the Arts such as Eugene O'Neil and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Unique insights such as the Irish dominance of the theatre in the first quaret of the twentieth century are obvious now, think Yeats, Shaw, Fitzgerald, but not entirely obvious to this reviewer. The usual suspects in the political world are profiled in enough detail for an overview. James Michael Curley of Boston gets his own chapter as does Al Smith, the first Irish-American Catholic nominated for President by a major party. The Irish-Americans we would like to forget are profiled; Joe McCarthy with his paranoia and Father Coughlin's anti-semitism during the New Deal. This may be a little heavy for a beach read this summer, but a copy can probably be found on Amazon at reasonable price and put on your reading list.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-12-09 00:00:00 William Hickey Schlereth provides a lengthy, but useful and insightful introduction tracing various approaches to American material cultural studies, and defining it as a mode of inquiry with a historical basis. He focuses on historical, rather than art historical material culture, which tends toward the aesthetic rather than the analytic. He divides material culture studies into three chronological phases: Collecting/Classifying, Descriptive/Historical, and Analytical/Explanatory. Following Schlereth's introduction, is an anthology of material cultural essays devoted to theory, method, and implemented practice, concluding with a short bibliographic essay. An exemplary and engaging collection.