A “thoroughly researched [and] historically enlightening” account of how the Commonwealth of Virginia split in two in the midst of war (Civil War News). “West Virginia was the child of the storm.” —Mountaineer historian and Civil War veteran Maj. Theodore F. Lang As the Civil War raged, the northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union’s 35th state. Seceding from Secession chronicles those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of West Virginia. President Abraham Lincoln, an astute lawyer in his own right, played a critical role in birthing the new state. The constitutionality of the mechanism by which the new state would be created concerned the president, and he polled every member of his cabinet before signing the bill. Seceding from Secession includes a detailed discussion of the 1871 U.S. Supreme Court decision Virginia v. West Virginia, in which former Lincoln cabinet member Salmon Chase presided as chief justice over the court that decided the constitutionality of the momentous event. Grounded in a wide variety of sources and including a foreword by Frank J. Williams, former Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and Chairman Emeritus of the Lincoln Forum, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in American history.

The Shelburne Marble and the Salem Limestone have been used extensively in buildings and monuments, and for this reason they were selected as test stones for the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program stone exposure studies. Mineralogical characterization of fresh Shelburne Marble and fresh Salem Limestone provides a basis for recognizing mineralogical changes that may occur in samples when they are weathered.

"'1968: That moment began the politicization of the confirmation process and turned it into the ugly ritual we know too well'. Faced with the pending resignation of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court's longtime liberal kingpin, President Lyndon Johnson named his longtime adviser Abe Fortas to become Warren's successor. What Washington pundits believed would be a routine confirmation instead ignited a fractious war between liberals and conservatives eager to seize control of the judicial body. Michael Bobelian reveals the extent of the unprecedented machinations perpetrated to capture the Court, including LBJ's removal of two justices to make room for his favorites, the Senate's first filibuster against a Court nominee, Strom Thurmond's airing of pornographic movies to showcase Fortas's purported moral turpitude, and Richard Nixon who, in his zeal to win the presidency, stoked the fires of hatred and bigotry to transform the Court into a political weapon."--