From the 1880s until after World War I, Texas prosecutions for adultery, fornication, rape, seduction, and sodomy were many, but formal penal code seemed much too merciful to suit most southerners, who believed in direct and personal redress of such wrongs. Unwritten law seemed to justify the killing or at least maiming of almost anyone who by actual physical contact or inappropriate comment offended southern notions of female virtue, male honor, or sanctity of marriage.Illicit sex is the catalyst in all the Texas murder trials recounted in Sex, Murder, and the Unwritten Law. In each account...

In the mid-1700s, in the tiny villa of San Fernando de Bexar, on the northern fringes of the Spanish Empire in North America, Hispanic women had legal rights that would have astonished their British counterparts half a continent to the east. Under Spanish law, even in the sparsely settled land that would one day become Texas, married women could own property in their own names. They could control and manage not only their own property but even that of their husbands. And if their property rights were infringed, they could seek redress in the courts. from the introductionThrough court cases...

"Myth and government clash and collaborate in one of America s largest and most remote canyonlands"
Owyhee County, Idaho, also known as the Big Quiet, is the largest and least inhabited area in the lower forty-eight states. Who has decided how to use it? From violent mine wars in the mid-nineteenth century to environmental conservation disputes at the end of the twentieth, people in the West have battled over the role of government and notions of American identity to answer this question. Winners ultimately controlled the perception of their battles, often shaping the contours of the...