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How does a popular uprising transform itself from the disorder of revolution into a legal system that carries out the daily administration required to govern? Americans faced this question during the Revolution as colonial legal structures collapsed under the period’s disorder. Yet by the end of the war, Americans managed to rebuild their courts and legislatures, imbuing such institutions with an authority that was widely respected. This remarkable transformation came about in unexpected ways. Howard Pashman here studies the surprising role played by property redistribution—seizing it from Loyalists and transferring it to supporters of independence—in the reconstruction of legal order during the Revolutionary War. Building a Revolutionary State looks closely at one state, New York, to understand the broader question of how legal structures emerged from an insurgency. By examining law as New Yorkers experienced it in daily life during the war, Pashman reconstructs a world of revolutionary law that prevailed during America’s transition to independence. In doing so, Pashman explores a central paradox of the revolutionary era: aggressive enforcement of partisan property rules actually had stabilizing effects that allowed insurgents to build legal institutions that enjoyed popular support. Tracing the transformation from revolutionary disorder to legal order, Building a New Revolutionary State gives us a radically fresh way to understand the emergence of new states.

The Hudson Valley’s dark past, from Prohibition-era shoot-outs to unsolved murders, in eleven heart-pounding true stories. The beautiful Hudson Valley of New York State is drenched in history, culture . . . and blood. This fascinating and thoroughly researched chronicle presents one killer story from every county in the region, including: Sullivan County: In the fall of 1893, Lizzie Halliday left a trail of bodies in her wake, slaughtering two strangers and her husband before stabbing a nurse to death at the asylum where she lived. Albany County: A Jazz Age politician, tired of fighting with his overbearing wife, murdered her and buried the body under the front porch. Columbia County: In 1882, a cantankerous old miner, dubbed the “Austerlitz Cannibal” by the press, chopped up his partner before he himself swung from the end of a rope.

In the tradition of the preceding volumes - the first of which was published in 1964 - this work synthesizes edited documents, including correspondence, ship logs, muster rolls, orders, and newspaper accounts, that provide a comprehensive understanding of the war at sea in the spring of 1778. The editors organize this wide array of texts chronologically by theater and incorporate French, Italian, and Spanish transcriptions with English translations throughout.