In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 306 with the previous five contributions. Taylor chronicles the Tennessee Valley Authority’s evolution from the expert-driven and consumptionpromoting public utility to a “technology-driven bureaucracy” during the Cold War, and finally Sugita provides an excellent Sun Belt primer but a somewhat uncritical look at the Arizona Telemedicine Program, a late 1970s conservation advocate that promoted wood stoves and electric cars (p. 172). Overall, this is a solid contribution to a good series. Wright, Delfino, and Gillespie are on the mark in calling for more work on the technological aspects of southern industrialization. Networks are a useful concept for understanding the spread of technologies throughout underdeveloped areas, and one hopes that the authors here continue to utilize and refine their usage of the term in studying various eras in southern history. Although stretching the chronological boundaries of this collection past 1925 decreases the volume’s effectiveness, popular and scholarly readers can still learn much from these well-written and interesting case studies. SHEPHERD W. MCKINLEY University of North Carolina at Charlotte Mobile’s Legal Legacy: 300 Years of Law in the Port City. By Ben Erickson. Birmingham: Association Publishing, 2008. vi, 218 pp. $39.95. ISBN 9780 -9668380-8-4. With Mobile’s civic history sprawled across three centuries, an attempt to capture the Port City’s history is no small undertaking, even if the focus of the inquiry is limited to Mobile’s legal heritage. In fact, the city’s history is so intertwined with the judges and lawyers who called it home that even a legal history cannot help but reflect on the history of Mobile as a whole. Such is the immediate and abiding lesson to be drawn from Mobile’s Legal Legacy: 300 Years of Law in the Port City. In this book, Ben Erickson recounts Mobile’s legal history over the course of the last three centuries . That tale begins with Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founding a French colony on the Mobile River in 1702 and, within six years, becoming the subject of the colony’s first official trial when he was accused, unsuccessfully, of malfeasance by disgruntled colonists. Not surprisingly, Bienville soon came to embrace his king’s admonition to ban lawyers at all costs from the young colony. O C T O B E R 2 0 0 9 307 Over the course of Mobile’s first century, the flags of France, England, and finally Spain flew over Mobile. Then, in 1813, American troops commanded by General James Wilkinson raised the Stars and Stripes over the city. Such evolutions in ownership—sometimes achieved peacefully , other times by conquest—ensured plentiful legal work for attorneys charged with sorting out Mobile’s complex land claims and otherwise shepherding the city’s journey into adolescence. Within such a crucible , a cadre of talented attorneys rose to prominence and left a lasting impression on not merely Mobile but even the nation. Their numbers included such men as Harry Toulmin, the territorial judge who crafted Toulmin’s Digest (the first digest of the laws of Alabama), and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell. Toulmin and Campbell are likely well known to most serious students of Alabama history. Thus, Erickson is due much credit for bringing attention to several of their significant but often overlooked contemporaries —attorneys William Crawford, Henry Hitchcock, and Alexander Meek, for example. Erickson narrates the stories of these three and their colleagues with a steady hand. But he also has an eye for the ignoble incident and interlude as well—the legal wrangles associated with the slave ships Merino, Louisa, and Constitution, for example, or the public hanging of convicted murderer Charles Boyington in 1835. As Erickson’s narrative continues through the nineteenth century, it encompasses such events and episodes in Mobile’s civic and legal history as secession and surrender, economic panics, yellow fever epidemics, fires, hurricanes, riots, and even the disastrous explosion of an ammunition depot in 1865 that claimed hundreds of lives. Other prominent legal practitioners are profiled as well. Some need no introduction...

pdf

Share