The prosecution of African slaves for murder and piracy aboard an illegal Spanish slave ship off the coast of Cuba, and their dramatic acquittal at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1841, was all but forgotten until Steven Spielberg’s film “Amistad” refreshed our memory. The movie was based primarily on a 1987 book by Howard Jones. (Click on the images above for details or to purchase.)

For a deeper exploration of the legal issues—including the complete trial record and maps of the voyages—see the University of Missouri Law School’s website.

Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy
By Howard Jones
Oxford University Press, 1987, 304 pages
$31.09 paperback, $13.47 Kindle

In 1839, captive Africans being transported illegally as slaves commandeered the Spanish slave ship La Amistad (“Friendship”) off the Cuban coast, and killed all but two of the crew. The 53 mutineers were tricked by the surviving crew members into sailing to the Long Island coast instead of back to Africa. The U.S. Navy siezed and imprisoned the Africans, and charged them with murder and piracy. In March 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court freed the surviving 35 Africans (including their leader Cinque), and 10 months later they returned to Sierra Leone. “The trial raised fundamental legal questions about the relevance of slavery and race to the American conception of liberty,” according to Library Journal, and “temporarily united disparate factions of the fledgling abolitionist movement.” It also prompted President Van Buren to improperly interfere with the judicial process. Jones’s book is generously illustrated and documented.

The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone
Iyunolu Folayan Osagie
University of Georgia Press, 2003, 216 pages
$22.95 paperback

This “extended essay” examines the cultural significance of the 1839 Amistad revolt in contemporary America and Africa. The author is from Sierra Leone, where the Africans on the Amistad were enslaved. She sees the “re-memory” of the story, chiefly as a result of Spielberg’s 1997 film “Amistad,” as significant for the national and cultural identity in both Africa and the African diaspora in America.

Amistad
Starring Djimon Hounsou (as Cinque), Matthew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman, and Anthony Hopkins. Director Steven Spielberg
Dreamworks, 1997, 2 hrs 35 mins, Rated R
$7.99 on DVD

“Amistad” garnered four Academy Award nominations, including Best Supporting Actor (Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams). BlogCritics called it “one of the more dramatic and important films of the decade. ‘Amistad’ serves as a reminder that freedom is not to be taken for granted.”

A review in Entertainment Weekly, on the other hand, said the film “takes on a mass atrocity…but its approach is almost bizarrely academic. Midway through, there’s a 20-minute sequence that showcases, in graphic detail, the claustrophobic horrors of the ‘Middle Passage’ (bloody whippings, starvation, mass drownings). Otherwise, the film seems all but uninterested in the psychological experience of slavery. Its investment is in the issue of slavery, one that Spielberg uses to craft a courtroom drama of dull, soapbox ponderousness. By the time John Q. Adams shows up at the Supreme Court, the film has lapsed into liberal self-caricature.”

The 1945-46 Nuremberg trial of Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity was the first international criminal tribunal, and the foundation of international justice and human rights policies. Following are reviews of three books and three DVDs. (Click on the book or DVD images for details, or to purchase.)

Justice at Nuremberg
By Robert E. Conot
Basic Books, 1993, 590 pages
$14.78 paperback

Originally published in 1983, this was the first, and is still the most comprehensive, dramatic account of the trial of 21 Nazi military and civilian leaders for atrocities they committed before and during World War II. Norman Birkett, one of the British judges, called it “the greatest trial in history.” Conot reconstructs both the proceedings at Nuremburg and the offenses with which the accused were charged. As sickening and dispiriting as the atrocities were, they are balanced by the dignity and fairness with which the trial was conducted. (Amazon.com mistakenly says this paperback edition has 230 pages.)

Nuremberg Diary
By G. M. Gilbert
Da Capo Press, 1995, 488 pages
$18.00 paperback

This book is both spellbinding and chilling. Dr. Gilbert was the prison psychologist at Nuremberg, watched and questioned the Nazi war criminals. With scientific dispassion he encouraged Göering, Speer, Hess, Ribbentrop, Frank, Jodl, Keitel, Streicher, and the others to reveal their innermost thoughts. In the process Gilbert exposed what motivated them to create the distorted Aryan utopia and the nightmarish worlds of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald. In Nuremberg Diary, he describes their day-to-day reactions to the trial proceedings; their off-the-record opinions of Hitler and the Third Reich; their views on slave labor, death camps, and the Jews; their testimony, feuds, and desperate maneuverings to deny their guilt.

The Nuremberg Legacy: How the Nazi War Crimes Trials Changed the Course of History
By Norbert Ehrenfreund
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 288 pages
$21.24 hardcover, $15.37 Kindle

Ehrenfreund presents “a case for adhering to the Nuremberg legacy of fair treatment for even the most odious offenders” (Kirkus).

Judgment at Nuremberg
Starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximillian Schell, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift. Directed by Stanley Kramer
MGM Studio, 1961
$10.49 for DVD

This fictionalized version of the trial examines the questions of individual complicity in crimes committed by the state. Spencer Tracy plays Dan Haywood, the American judge selected to head the tribunal. Maximillian Schell won an Oscar for his role as counsel for the defense. The courtroom scenes depict graphic accounts of murder and crimes against humanity, including actual historical footage, exceptionally gruesome for a mainstream film in 1961, of huge piles of naked corpses bulldozed into pits.

Nuremberg
Starring Alec Baldwin, Brian Cox, Christopher Plummer, Jill Hennessy. Directed by Yves Simoneau
Turner Home Entertainment, 2001 (180 minutes)
$13.99 for DVD

This TV movie drives home the point that the prosecutors took a big risk in trying the Nazi high command for war crimes, which was then a novel and controversial concept. There was a passion for vengeance in the countries that had suffered under the Nazis; no international criminal laws existed; and the there was no assurance that the prosecutors would win convictions. If acquitted, the defendants would go free. “The political maneuvering between Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union that made [the trial] possible is explained fairly well in the early portions of the film,” said reviewer Robert J. McNamara.

Alec Baldwin stars as Robert Jackson, a U.S. Supreme Court justice who served as the chief prosecutor for the Allies at Nuremberg. “Baldwin at times delivers lines that seem to have been lifted from a high school history textbook,” said McNamara. But Brian Cox’s portrayal of the manipulative defendant Hermann Goering (Hitler’s deputy) is brilliant.

Nuremberg: Tyranny on Trial
The History Channel (A&E Home Video), 1995
$19.99 for DVD

This documentary film features some of the men who were present at the trials, including the chief counsel for the prosecution, telling how they planned the case against the defendants, knowing that the eyes of the world and the judgment of history watched their every move.

Click on the images for details, or to purchase

The Buffalo Creek Disaster: How the survivors of one of the worst disasters in coal-mining history brought suit against the coal company—and won
By Gerald M. Stern
Vintage, 2008, 304 pages
$6.24 paperback

In February 1972, an impoundment dam owned (and negligently maintained) by the Pittston Coal Company burst, sending a 25-foot tidal wave of water, sludge, and debris crashing into southern West Virginia’s Buffalo Creek hollow, leaving over 100 dead, 1,000 injured, and 4,000 homeless.

Of the two books reviewed here, The Buffalo Creek Disaster is the one that should have been made into a movie. The magnitude of the tragedy was massive. The defendant Pittston was clearly the heartless villain, showing callous disregard for human life. The jury verdict was deeply satisfying. And the author Stern, the lawyer who won the case, is eloquent. Stern refrains from bashing the defendant; rather he evokes sympathy and admiration for the survivors, who banded together to sue, foregoing settlement offers that were very tempting since many of them were destitute. The Chicago Tribune called the book “a fascinating tale of how investigative lawyers work.”

A Civil Action
By Jonathan Harr
Vintage, 1996, 502 pages
$10.88 paperback

W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods dumped a carcinogenic industrial solvent into the water table of Woburn, Massachusetts, for years. In 1981, the families of eight leukemia victims sued, but the case was mired in legal maneuvering and infighting. Many of the characters are fascinating, including the hotshot plaintiff’s lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, the brilliant defense lawyer Jerome Facher, and the perjurious tannery owner who concealed the dumping. The plaintiffs ended up with a settlement that was so small that Schlichtmann reckoned he failed. The author, a journalist, tells the story mainly from Schlichtmann’s point of view.

“A Civil Action” (VHS)
Starring John Travolta, Robert Duvall, Kathleen Quinlan
Directed by Steven Zaillian
Walt Disney Video, 1999,  rated PG-13
$10.49

John Travolta plays Schlichtmann, and Robert Duvall plays Facher. Duvall steals the show. The movie does a good job of condensing the 502-page book, but as a Hollywood drama it’s not satisfying because (a) Schlictmann the movie character is not nearly as three-dimensional as portrayed in the book; and (b) the Woburn survivors don’t triumph, as do the Buffalo Creek survivors; so the tragedy of cancer is compounded by the implied denial of justice.