Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents. This item is unavailable.Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents

In 1896 The United States Supreme Court made a decision in the case of Plessy v Ferguson which made possible a legal system of racial segregation in the US which was not overturned until the ruling of Brown v Board of Education in 1954.;In this introduction students are given the Court's reasoning, the factors that made such a decision possible, and the effects of the decision. It illuminates also the modern debate over affirmative action.

Brook Thomas is chair of the English and Comparative Literature Department at the University of California, Irvine. After a book on James Joyces Ulysses (1982), he turned his attention to the intersections of law, literature, and cultural history in the United States. He is author of Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987): The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (1991); and American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997). He has lectured on Plessy v. Ferguson to more than five thousand undergraduates over the course of several years.