Books, Arts & Manners: A Moment in History

Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy, by Howard Jones (Oxford, 271 pp., $22.95)

As historians have exhausted the larger issues of American history, they have turned to the smaller, and sometimes to legal cases—especially those of the nineteenth century, when points of law were being tied together into a loose fabric that would cover much of the nation’s later history. Howard Jones has chosen the Amistad case of 1839-41. But the smaller can illuminate the larger, and let it be said quickly that Mutiny on the Amistad is no legal chronicle but an analysis of an important moment in American history that casts a light upon politics and society during the preceding half -century, back to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and similarly illumines the approaching Civil War.

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Robert H. Ferrell

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Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy, by Howard Jones (Oxford, 271 pp., $22.95)

As historians have exhausted the larger issues of American history, they have turned to the smaller, and sometimes to legal cases—especially those of the nineteenth century, when points of law were being tied together into a loose fabric that would cover much of the nation’s later history. Howard Jones has chosen the Amistad case of 1839-41. But the smaller can illuminate the larger, and let it be said quickly that Mutiny on the Amistad is no legal chronicle but an analysis of an important moment in American history that casts a light upon politics and society during the preceding half -century, back to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and similarly illumines the approaching Civil War.