Author: Professor Davis teaches United States constitutional, legal, and economic history at Arizona State University. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Fordham University in New York City, he earned from Columbia University in the City of New York a M.A. and Ph.D. in United States history and African history. Dr. Davis holds a M.A. in journalism from Ball State University in Indiana, and a J.D. from the University at Buffalo. He is an attorney and counselor at law admitted to practice in the states of Arizona and New York. He has taught at several colleges and universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was for ten years before joining the ASU faculty in 1996, and Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he taught also for ten years.

He has received a variety of awards for scholarship and has been a National Teaching Fellow, an Herbert H. Lehman Fellow, a Ford Foundation Advanced Study Fellow, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, twice a Fulbright Fellow, a Smithsonian Institution Fellow, and an American Bar Foundation Visiting Fellow. His writings have appeared in various scholarly journals. Since 1974 he has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Negro History, and he is an editorial board member of the Law and History Review, the journal of the American Society for Legal History.

Publisher: Notable Trials Library [History’s Most Famous Trials ] Gryphon Editions; originally published in 1985; Facsimile.

Format/Condition: New quarter leather book is in fine condition.

Description: A comprehensive look at the New York City slave conspiracy of 1741 and the New York African community of that time. In March of 1741, New York City was burning. And by the time the reckoning was finished, thirteen blacks were burned at the stake, four whites were hanged, and another seventeen blacks were hanged with them.

The issue of race and the justice system is one that is in constant debate—from simply fair treatment of the law all the way to capital punishment. In this volume, which was the winner of a Gustavus Myers Center Award as one of the best books published in 1985 on racial intolerance in the United States, the author explores the events surrounding the fire that consumed Manhattan in 1741 and the justice at the time.