Changes

I am always looking for books to assign in class that tell a story that is compelling enough to pull student readers in, but that also illuminate the main themes of my course. I often assign books like Kevin Boyle’s ''Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age'' and Jill Lepore’s ''New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan'' that use a single trial or event to reveal a larger world. I hope ''The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case'' will be assigned (and read) for the same reasons.