BLS Library Blog

During February 2025, BLS Library observes Black History Month, a celebration of the rich history, culture, and achievements of Black and African American communities.  While its origins date back to historian Carter G. Woodson's efforts in the 1920s, the first Black History Month celebration took place in February 1970, at Kent State University. President Gerald Ford was the first President to officially recognize the observance of Black History Month in 1976. Congress took on the mantle in 1986 by passing Public Law 99-244 which designated February 1986 as "National Black (Afro-American) History Month.”  Since 1996, Presidents have issued annual proclamations observing and celebrating National Black History Month. 

Book Display (1st Floor):

To celebrate Black History Month 2025, the library has an array of books in our collection on display on the library’s first floor, near the circulation desk and alcove. On display are titles about BLS alumni including the first Black woman from Queens admitted to the New York bar, Florence Victoria Lucas ‘39 and former New York City Mayor, David Dinkins ‘56. We have books on Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, the history of the civil rights movement, Barack Obama, and more. 

Digital Display 

In addition to our physical book display, we also have a digital display of BLS Library resources relevant to Black History Month.  Browse the titles in the digital display at https://guides.brooklaw.edu/digital_book_displays/Black_History_Month 

Do come check out both our physical and digital displays! If there are additional resources that you think would be of interest to the BLS community, let us know at askthelibrary@brooklaw.edu

Below is a description of a free, half-hour Zoom program tracing the history of languages in New York City. This program requires free online registration. Note: BLS Library is purchasing multi-user electronic access to Ross Perlin's new book, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. (We expect the vendor to provide us with access to this ebook within a few days.)

Free Talk at noon today: Live From New Amsterdam: Language City (via Zoom):

Featuring: Ross Perlin & Russell Shorto    

The description of this program at New York Historical Society’s website states: “Four centuries ago, what had been a Lenape-speaking archipelago suddenly became New Amsterdam—a crossroads of Native American, European, and African cultures. Here, 18 languages were reported as being spoken within the first few decades, and the number is likely far greater. Join Ross Perlin, author of the new book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, and Russell Shorto [director of the New Amsterdam Project at the New-York Historical Society] as they trace this history of language and how it set the template for the city’s extraordinary transformation into one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the world.”

Also, New York Historical Society has a new installation: New York Before New York: The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam.  New York Historical Society states it offers “pay as you wish” admission on Friday evenings from 6-8 pm.  (NYHS generally charges students $13 for admission.)  Also, beginning on April 1 at midnight, those with Brooklyn, New York or Queens Public Library cards will be able to try to reserve one of the limited number of free “Culture Passes” offering free admission to New York Historical Society.  (Each month, a new group of Culture Passes becomes available.)  

This past weekend marked the 50^th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, a pivotal point in LGBTQ history.  The New York Public Library is commemorating this event with an exhibition featuring photographs by two photojournalists, Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies, that captured major events in the gay rights movement in the 60s and 70s, alongside ephemera, periodicals, and other items from the library’s archival holdings.  The exhibition is free and open until July 13^th at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in Manhattan.   Be sure to check it out before it closes!  The NYPL has also provided book recommendations, podcasts, and other resources to learn more about the LGBTQ civil rights movement.  (https://www.nypl.org/stonewall50)

The BLS Library also has several LGBTQ resources. Check out our research guide for books, journals, major federal cases, legislation and a list of organizations advocating for LGBTQ rights.  

She was a young actress and model, new to New York City, who caught the attention of a wealthy and famous older man.  After gaining the trust of her mother, the man lured the 16 year old alone to his apartment, plied her with champagne, and raped her after she had passed out.  Despite this, she continued to have a relationship with him for a number of years, while he continued to support her family financially.

The Girl on the Velvet Swing

Some time later, she married another man, the heir to the fortune of a well-to-do Pittsburgh family. He had his own dark past: posing as a theatrical agent in New York, he had physically abused several young aspiring actresses. The women were all paid off to ensure their silence.

These events may sound all too familiar, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, but they occurred in the early 1900s and are the subject of Simon Baatz’s book The Girl on the Velvet Swing (Call No. HV 6534.N5 B33 2018). The young model was Evelyn Nesbit, the man who sexually assaulted her was renowned architect Stanford White, and her husband was Harry Thaw.  Nesbit would become one of the first fashion icons, her image appearing in advertisements everywhere, but her prior entanglement with White would haunt her for her entire life. Things came to a head one sweltering night in 1906 when Thaw saw White in attendance at a performance in the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden. Yelling “You’ve ruined my wife,” he pulled out a pistol and shot White three times at close range.  Stanny, as he was known to his friends, died instantly in a building of his own design (this second iteration of Madison Square Garden, erected in 1890, would be torn down in 1925.)

Stanford White

The story of Nesbit, White, and Thaw has been covered before in other books, including Nesbit’s autobiography from 1934, and Paula Uruburu’s American Eve (2008).  What distinguishes The Girl in the Velvet Swing is the depth it gets into in describing the multiple trials and appeals, and the legal maneuvering undertaken by Thaw and his ever-changing legal team.  How to defend the accused when he shot the victim in front of countless witnesses? Would the insanity defense fly if Thaw himself refused to assert it?  How to take advantage of the system and free Thaw once he was committed to an asylum?

The book’s coverage of Thaw’s trial proceedings is full of rich detail, sourced from the many newspapers that were breathlessly reporting on the latest legal twists and turns: the New York World, New York American, New York Sun, among others (the Author’s Note at the end of the book provides further context as to the newspaper coverage.)  Especially telling are the legal shenanigans that ensue after Thaw escapes from the Matteawan asylum in New York state. He lands in a small Quebec town across the border from Vermont, and his army of lawyers wage legal battle over extradition that spills over into the courts and politics of Canada.

Harry Thaw

When all was said and done, Harry Thaw had hired around 40 lawyers on his legal team, and had spent the staggering sum of $1 million on legal fees.  And he was free.  It’s another story that remains all too familiar to us today.

Towards the end, the book circles back to the putative center of the story, the girl who once innocently swung on Stanford White’s favorite apparatus, a velvet swing.  But maybe the story was never really about Evelyn Nesbit.  As she once lamented: “Stanny White was killed. But my fate was worse. I lived.” 

Memorial Day festivities are now 150 years old. At the end of the Civil War, Americans faced a formidable challenge: how to memorialize 625,000 dead soldiers, Northern and Southern. As Walt Whitman mused, it was “the dead, the dead, the dead — our dead — or South or North, ours all” that preoccupied the country. After all, if the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, four million names would be on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, instead of 58,000.

In the North, Memorial Day emerged in 1868 when the Grand Army of the Republic called on communities to conduct grave-decorating ceremonies. On May 30, funereal events attracted thousands of people at hundreds of cemeteries in countless towns, cities and mere crossroads. By the 1870s, one could not live in an American town, North or South, and be unaware of the spring ritual. The practice of decorating graves which gave rise to an alternative name, Decoration Day did not start with the 1868 events, nor was it an exclusively Northern practice. In 1866 the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Columbus, Ga., chose April 26, the anniversary of Gen. Joseph Johnston’s final surrender to Gen. William T. Sherman, to commemorate fallen Confederate soldiers. Later, both May 10, the anniversary of Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s death, and June 3, the birthday of Jefferson Davis, were designated Confederate Memorial Day in different states.

Memorial Days were initially occasions of sacred bereavement, and from the war’s end to the early 20th century they helped forge national reconciliation around soldierly sacrifice, regardless of cause. In North and South, orators and participants frequently called Memorial Day an “American All Saints Day,” likening it to the European Catholic tradition of whole towns marching to churchyards to honor dead loved ones.

The ritual quickly became the tool of partisan memory, at least through the violent Reconstruction years. In the South, Memorial Day was a means of confronting the Confederacy’s defeat without repudiating its cause. Some Southern orators stressed Christian notions of noble sacrifice. Others, however, used the ritual for Confederate vindication and renewed assertions of white supremacy. Blacks had a place in this Confederate narrative, but only as time-warped loyal slaves who were supposed to remain frozen in the past. Yankee Memorial Day orations often righteously claimed the high ground of blood sacrifice to save the Union and destroy slavery.

But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender.

Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.

After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.

Hat tip: David W. Blight, NY Times

Brooklyn Law School recently digitized and made accessible its collection of Brooklyn Law School’s student run newspaper, The Justinian.  The digitized collection is available on Brooklyn Law School’s digital repository, BrooklynWorks. The BLS student-run periodical program began in 1918 as The Barrister. It was published monthly until 1922. Almost a decade later, in 1931, the periodical’s title changed to The Justinian. Publication continued until 1998. The Justinian was not produced from May 1945 to September 1954. After 1998, it was referred to as Brooklyn Law School News, which ran from 2002 to 2006.

The Brooklyn Law School Library Archives provides digitized versions of this printed collection from April 1932 to October 2006. The content has complete OCR text recognition for all 238 issues. The periodicals were published monthly. For most April issues, there is a special for April Fool’s Day. For 88 years, these news-sources have been accurate portrayals of political, social, economic, and local topics that have interested Brooklyn Law School students and engaged them in active involvement and debate.

The rhetoric which Donald Trump practices works partly because Trump is employing many of the same rhetorical strategies used by one of the greatest orators in history: Cicero. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) was born on January 3, 106 BC in the hill town of Arpinum, about 60 miles southeast of Rome. He won his share of elections and moved up the ranks of the Roman republic until he became consul, the highest office in the land, at a younger age than anyone ever had without coming from a politically connected family. He was the Kennedy or the Obama of first-century-B.C. Rome. He was a Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist. But he sounded a lot like Trump when it came to rhetoric. And he knew how to use it.

When Cicero was attacking the corrupt governor Gaius Verres (see Brooklyn Law School Library’s 2011 e-book Cicero, Against Verres, 2.1.53-86), he used the rhetorical device of preterition, an unfamiliar word whose concept has become familiar this year. Preterition is when a speaker says he will not mention something, usually something unsavory. By naming the thing he will not mention, of course he has already planted the idea in his listeners’ minds. “Nothing shall be said of his drunken nocturnal revels; no mention shall be made of his pimps and dicers,” Cicero said about Verres. The list went on. Cicero rounded it out by saying, “The rest of his life has been such that I can well afford to put up with the loss of not mentioning those enormities.” If listeners didn’t know before about Verres’ liking for alcohol and prostitutes, they did now.

Then there Cicero’s tactic of asking the audience a leading question – stirring up their enthusiasm as participants, and suggesting an answer that he cannot state himself. That sort of question is formally called anachinosis. Defending his friend Rabirius, who had a role in the death of a populist political figure, Cicero laid out the chaotic situation and asked, “What would you do in such a crisis? …. While the consuls were summoning you to uphold the safety and liberty of your country, which authority, which invitation, which party would you prefer to follow, whose command would you select to obey?” Cicero led his listeners to believe that, amid the tumult that led to the death, any one of them might well have acted just like Rabirius.

Then there is ecphonesis which we see in the exclamation at the end of Trump’s tweets. “O tempora! O mores!” (“The times! The customs!”) Cicero wrote in one of his most famous expressions, evocatively proclaiming his distress about society in just a few punctuated words. Trump deploys ecphonesis effectively and memorably when he ends his tweets, “Sad!”

For more, see Brooklyn Law School Library’s 2002 e-book Brill’s Companion to Cicero: Oratory and Rhetoric intended as a companion to the study of Cicero’s oratory and rhetoric for both students and experts in the field: for the neophyte, it provides a starting point; for the veteran Ciceronian scholar, a place for renewing the dialogue about issues concerning Ciceronian oratory and rhetoric; for all, a site of engagement at various levels with Ciceronian scholarship and bibliography. The book is arranged chronologically and covers most aspects of Cicero’s oratory and rhetoric.

Brooklyn Law School Library’s e-book collection has a great title for this time of year:  A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish by Joshua Eli Plaut. The book combines history, Jewish studies and sociology beginning with urban-bourgeois Jewish émigrés from German-speaking countries who decorated trees, exchanged presents and sang carols in “a family festival devoid of religious meaning.” The author describes how modern Jews elevated the once-minor holiday of Hanukkah, which this year ends tonight, to its big-time status as Christmas’s partner. With chapters on intermarriage, holiday cards designed for blended couples, and Jewish composers of Christmas songs, the author explains how German-American Jews “ate customary Christmas foods, particularly sweets like stollen, lebkuchen and pfefferkuc (although they prepared the treats with butter instead of lard).” He explains that “Jews flock to Chinese restaurants on Christmas not only because they are open while other restaurants are closed but also because Jews regard eating Chinese food as a special occasion.” Read why Jews, before or after their Chinese Christmas dinners, hit the movies. In the first decade of the 20th century, we learn, 42 nickelodeons were in the Lower East Side of New York with 10 more uptown in what was branded Jewish Harlem.

Plaut reports on the tradition of Jewish volunteering, the Christmas mitzvah — something to do when the rest of the world has the day off. Jews feed the hungry, fill in for Christians at work, donate toys, play Santa. These are activities that allow “Jews the opportunity to participate in Christmas, but in a way that does not detract from their Jewish identity; in fact, their volunteerism reinforces their Jewishness.”

The introduction to “A Kosher Christmas” says: “We encounter in the following chapters a multitude of distinctive strategies that portray how Jews survive and thrive in American society and how they transform Christmastime into a holiday season belonging to all Americans. The concluding chapter “Menorahs Next to Madonnas” tells the story from 1993 when Myrna Holzman, a retired public-school teacher in New York and an avid stamp collector, started a crusade to convince the U.S. Postal Service to produce a Hanukkah stamp. Her Hanukkah stamp campaign finally resulted in the U.S. Postal Service’s release of a Hanukkah stamp in 1996. The postal service invited her to the launching ceremony for the new Hanukkah stamp, the first stamp to be a joint-issue between the United States and Israel. To Myrna’s surprise, the symbol chosen to represent Hanukkah was a modern rendition of the menorah, consisting of playful, colorful shapes, The choice was ironic because the post office committee had previously rejected the menorah as a religious symbol. In 2004, the postal service released another Hanukkah stamp, this time featuring a dreidel, as Myrna had originally suggested. At 173 pages plus notes, this book is recommended for readers interested in an academic study of American Jewish cultural traditions and the “December Dilemma” of Christmas v. Chanukah as the inevitable duel that confronts many American Jews each December.

The Brooklyn Law School Library has placed an order for The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives (Call No. KF9351.E37 2017) by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jesse Eisinger. The book is a blistering account of corporate greed and impunity, and the reckless, often anemic response from the Department of Justice. The book asks why no bankers were put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008 and why CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity. The problem goes beyond banks deemed “Too Big to Fail” to almost every large corporation in America—to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. Eisinger starts his account with a story that gives the book its title. In the early 2000s, James Comey was the U.S. Attorney in charge of the most important local branch of the Department of Justice, the Southern District of New York, whose jurisdiction covers Wall Street. At Comey’s first meeting with the prosecutors on his team, he asked who among them had never lost a case. Many proudly raised their hands. “My friends and I have a name for you guys,” he said. “You are members of what we like to call the Chickenshit Club.” Comey was challenging them to be aggressive, to risk losing. A character-driven narrative, the book tells the story from inside the Department of Justice. The complex and richly reported story spans the last decade and a half of prosecutorial fiascos, corporate lobbying, trial losses, and culture shifts that have stripped the government of the will and ability to prosecute top corporate executives.

The book begins in the 1970s, when the government pioneered the notion that top corporate executives, not just seedy crooks, could commit heinous crimes and go to prison. The book travels to trading desks on Wall Street, to corporate boardrooms and the offices of prosecutors and F.B.I agents. These revealing looks provide context for the evolution of the Justice Department’s approach to pursuing corporate criminals through the early aughts and into the Justice Department of today. Exposing one of the most important scandals of our time, The Chickenshit Club provides a clear, detailed explanation as to how our Justice Department has come to avoid, bungle, and mismanage the fight to bring these alleged criminals to justice.

A more extensive book review by Thomas Fox can be found at JD Supra at this link. Fox also conducted an interview of Jesse Eisinger and Paul Pelletier, a key source for the book, at this link.

On Thursday, November 2, 2017, Cardozo School of Law will host a free event where the author will discuss his book. It will be held from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm in the Third-Floor Lounge at 55 5th Avenue, New York, NY. Register at this link if you want to attend.