We are grateful for comments on this introduction from James Mahoney, Audrey Sacks, and participants of the Thunder of History conference.

In the summer of 1935, a well-known legal academic and a young anthropologist ventured together to the Tongue River Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, to study the legal culture of the Cheyenne. Through the recollections of the elder members of the tribe, the two scholars came to understand how the Cheyenne resolved their social disputes and how they "cleaned up the messes" of homicide, theft, adultery, and the like. The lawyer and anthropologist, having analyzed over 50 "trouble-cases," were astonished by the "juristic beauty" and "legal genius" of Cheyenne dispute resolution. Studying the legal processes of the non-Western "other" exemplified for them the role of law in channeling human behavior and maintaining social cohesion. The Cheyenne had-or so it appeared to the two observers-the unique, problem-solving ability to reconcile general notions of law with the particular dictates of individual justice. The legal academic in charge of the study was Karl N. Llewellyn, the Betts professor of jurisprudence at

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World War I was a pivotal event for U.S. political and economic development, particularly in the realm of public finance. For it was during the war that the federal government ended its traditional reliance on regressive import duties and excise taxes as principal sources of revenue and began a modern era of fiscal governance, one based primarily on the direct and progressive taxation of personal and corporate income. The wartime tax regime, as the historian David M. Kennedy has observed, “occasioned a fiscal revolution in the United States.”

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