“The story of Smith & Wesson handguns and their evolution is one of the hallowed tales of American firearms’ history,” according to the firearms writer Jim Casada. Anyone who collects Smith & Wessons or is simply interested in their backstory will cherish this book. Though originally published in 1945, more than half a century ago, Smith & Wesson Hand Guns remains the source for Smith & Wesson enthusiasts. It is an authoritative reference and has remained, for over five decades, the cornerstone upon which Smith & Wesson research rests. This work is foundational, supported by sixty-three detailed illustrations showing the handguns, the unique hammer mechanism, and facsimile reproductions of vintage advertising copy. The first twenty-four chapters of the book, which tell the story of Smith and Wesson and the development of Smith & Wesson handguns, are very informative. After the reader becomes familiar with Smith and Wesson’s history together, as well as their creation of a business, illustrations exhibiting Smith & Wesson handguns will show rather than tell of their magnificence. Finally, descriptions of different caliber guns are given, where readers will gain invaluable information regarding Smith & Wesson handguns. For any Smith & Wesson enthusiast or collector, this work is impossible to put down.

The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North’s largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city’s underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence—including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York—Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring—full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage—and significant—the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.

Endeavors to present the topic of Presumptive Evidence (and incidentally the Burden of Proof), as follows, viz: 1. A series of rules and sub-rules. 2. A series of illustrations under each rule. 3. A discussion or commentary upon the rule and upon the particular illustration, showing the reasons for the rules themselves, and the grounds upon which the courts have proceeded in giving particular applications to them.