Circumventing the Law probes the rabbinic logic behind the use of loopholes, the legal phenomenon of finding and using gaps within law to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. The logic of ha’aramah, a subset of rabbinic legal circumventions mostly defined as a tool for private life, underpins both well-known circumventions, such as selling leaven before Passover, and lesser-known mechanisms, such as designating an animal intended for sacrifice “blemished” before birth to allow it to be slaughtered for food instead. Elana Stein Hain traces the development of these loopholes over time, revealing that rabbinic literature does not consistently accept or reject loopholes. Instead, rabbinic Judaism applies categories of evasion (prohibited), avoidance (permitted), and avoision (contested) to loopholes on a case-by-case basis. The intended outcome of a given loophole determines its classification, as does the legal integrity of the circumventive process in question.

Yet these understandings of loopholes are not static—instead, rabbinic attitudes toward loopholing change over time. Early works display an objective, performative understanding of the self and of intention, but evolve over time to reflect more subjective and intimate understanding of the self and intention. This evolution redefines what legal integrity means in Jewish legal philosophy.

Circumventing the Law brings readers through the Second Temple period to the modern era to see how loopholing has evolved over millennia. With a focus on late antiquity, Stein Hain explores tannaitic literature, the Palestinian Talmud, and contemporaneous Greco-Roman and Persian thought to show that when warranted, Jewish rhetoric and philosophy around understandings of loopholes was a unique phenomenon that relied on changes in understanding the definition of integrity itself, a key finding for scholars of Jewish Studies and of religious and of secular law writ large.

Home to the first two drafts of the U.S. Constitution, an original printer’s proof of the Declaration of Independence, and the earliest surviving American photograph, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) is one of the nation’s largest libraries. Published in conjunction with the anniversary of the Society’s founding in 1824, Two Hundred Years is the first book to survey the more than twenty-one million documents, newspapers, graphics, and rare books in its archive.

The book presents one hundred essays highlighting carefully preserved artifacts, spanning the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. Drawing on everything from letters and maps, paintings and photographs, family Bibles and musical scores, Two Hundred Years reflects on the early days of the nation, the relationships colonists had with indigenous peoples, the rapid development of Philadelphia, and the evolution of banking, engineering, and medicine, among other industries and sectors. Through such collections as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers and the archives of the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, HSP enables stories to come to light, including those of women, people of color, and immigrants, that would otherwise go untold. Creative artists and their audiences, technological innovators, and the people they impact, are all represented in this extraordinary book.

Two Hundred Years is not only a beautifully illustrated tour of the HSP’s vast holdings but also a comprehensive story of the origin and recent past of the United States told through the artifacts and documents carefully preserved, protected, and treasured by one of the nation’s oldest historical institutions.

Contributors: Lee Arnold, David Barnes, Katy Bodenhorn Barnes, Georgia B. Barnhill, Wendy Bellion, Rebecca Brannon, David R. Brigham, Kathleen M. Brown, David B. Brownlee, Jane E. Calvert, Mark Clague, Jeffrey A. Cohen, Marie A. Conn, Charles T. Cullen, Susan G. Davis, Richardson Dilworth, Megan J. Elias, Patrick M. Erben, Joel T. Fry, Alice L. George, James N. Green, Emma Hart, Sandra M. Hewlett, Martha Hutson-Saxton, Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Christina Larocco, Michael J. Lewis, Walter Licht, David M. Lubin, Anna O. Marley, Holly A. Mayer, Amy Meyers, Randall M. Miller, Elizabeth Milroy, Kristen Nassif, Therese O’Malley, Nell Irvin Painter, Robert McCracken Peck, Danya M. Pilgrim, Kymberly Pinder, John H. Pollack, Daniel K. Richter, Jessica Choppin Roney, Dan Rottenberg, Janny Scott, Matthew Skic, Patrick Spero, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, John C. Van Horne, Anne A. Verplanck, David Waldstreicher, Sarah J. Weatherwax, Ralph Richard Whyte, Kathryn E. Wilson, Michael Winship, James Wolfinger, Karin Wulf, Aaron V. Wunsch.

Americana Insights 2023 presents the latest research and discoveries on traditional American folk art and material culture. Groundbreaking essays by leading scholars provide a wealth of new insights on a wide array of artistic traditions. Covering a broad geographic area—including New England, the mid-Atlantic, South, and mid-West—and spanning the colonial era to early twentieth century, these essays enhance our understanding of the diverse American experience. This is the only interdisciplinary publication devoted exclusively to traditional Americana and folk art.

Contributors cover a range of topics including portraiture, furniture, jewelry, textiles, and works on paper. In the first volume, authors share groundbreaking research on the use of hooked rugs in the colonial revival era; revisit the work of a famed Connecticut portrait painter known as the Beardsley Limner and his namesake sitters; Rufus Porter’s work as an artist and entrepreneur; a distinctive group of paint-decorated dressing tables from New Hampshire; delicate cutworks made by an incarcerated inmate in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary; painted tavern signs; jewelry in folk portraiture; New Jersey schoolmaster and calligrapher Thomas Earl; and signature quilts from the nineteenth century.

Contributors: Deborah M. Child, Pamela and Brian Ehrlich, Cynthia Fowler, Emelie Gevalt, Mark D. Mitchell, Eileen M. Smiles, Laura Fecych Sprague.

During the first quarter-century after its founding, the United States was swept by a wave of land speculation so unprecedented in intensity and scale that contemporaries and historians alike have dubbed it a “mania.” In Speculation Nation, Michael A. Blaakman uncovers the revolutionary origins of this real-estate bonanza—a story of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and statecraft that stretched across millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and Georgia to the Great Lakes.

Patriot leaders staked the success of their revolution on the seizure and public sale of Native American territory. Initially, they hoped that fledgling state and national governments could pay the hefty costs of the War for Independence and extend a republican society of propertied citizens by selling expropriated land directly to white farmers. But those democratic plans quickly ran aground of a series of obstacles, including an economic depression and the ability of many Native nations to repel U.S. invasion. Wily merchants, lawyers, planters, and financiers rushed into the breach. Scrambling to profit off future expansion, they lobbied governments to convey massive tracts for pennies an acre, hounded revolutionary veterans to sell their land bounties for a pittance, and marketed the rustic ideal of a yeoman’s republic—the early American dream—while waiting for land values to rise.

When the land business crashed in the late 1790s, scores of “land mad” speculators found themselves imprisoned for debt or declaring bankruptcy. But through their visionary schemes and corrupt machinations, U.S. speculators and statesmen had spawned a distinctive and enduring form of settler colonialism: a financialized frontier, which transformed vast swaths of contested land into abstract commodities. Speculation Nation reveals how the era of land mania made Native dispossession a founding premise of the American republic and ultimately rooted the United States’ “empire of liberty” in speculative capitalism.

A richly illustrated presentation of the latest research on traditional American folk art

Americana Insights 2024 is the second volume of an annual series that presents the latest research and discoveries on traditional American folk art and material culture. This installment explores a diverse range of craftspeople and artifacts, treating readers to a journey from Appalachia to the mid-Atlantic and New England, and even onto the Atlantic Ocean. Each essay offers a fresh perspective on American creativity and ingenuity, introducing readers to the makers and materials of early America. This remains the only interdisciplinary publication devoted exclusively to traditional Americana and folk art.

Contributors cover a range of topics including historic Cherokee river cane basket weaving traditions, New England folk artists Sturtevant J. Hamblin, the almshouse paintings of German immigrant Charles Hofmann, and the display of American antiques on mid-twentieth-century ocean liners. Additional subjects include Pennsylvania German fraktur, carousel carving, carriage signs, quilts, and game boards.

Contributors: Trevor Brandt, Paul D’Ambrosio, Tobin Fraley, Emelie Gevalt, Christopher Malone, Richard Miller, Matthew Monk, Amelia Peck, Christian Roden, Cynthia Schaffner, Eileen M. Smiles, Jennifer Swope.