| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Local Matters: Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South. Ed. by Christopher Waldrep and Donald G. Nieman. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. xxii, 259 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-8203-2247-4.)

In the face of Alexis de Tocqueville's concerns about the dangers of American democracy, Christopher Waldrep and Donald G. Nieman note, he found hope in an American appreciation for constitutionalism and the law. America's legalism, he believed, should prevent the realization of what he saw as the potential for majoritarian tyranny in a democratic nation. In this collection of essays, Local Matters, the editors Waldrep and Nieman have provided, from a number of scholars, important discussions of that devotion to law Tocqueville observed among Americans. Examining how institutions operated on the ground, these essays emphasize that Americans' apparent dedication to legalism was a highly complex matter. With their focus on the nineteenth-century South, moreover, they do much to reveal the interactions of race, class, and gender in a society where ideals of democracy and hierarchy created a tension that could never be easily resolved. . . .

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