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The first and only historical account of the John Patterson administration
Reconstruction in the South is a much studied and yet little understood dark epoch in the region’s history; in many areas it was marked by such violence as to have been in all but name guerrilla warfare. Death at Cross Plains is the history of one such clash, and the story of one of its casualties—William Luke. Luke, born in Ireland, was a former Canadian minister fleeing a checkered past and perhaps seeking to redeem himself by service to the black freedmen of northern Alabama. In 1869 he took a teaching post at Talladega College, the only school for blacks in the area. Later taking the position of schoolteacher to the black railroad workers near Talladega, Luke found himself enmeshed in the web of racial antagonisms, xenophobia, and partisan conflict rampant in much of the South Death at Cross Plains follows the tragic course of William Luke’s life and death and vividly depicts the hatreds and failures that plunged the South into its darkest days.
Selected from papers presented at the 2000 Citadel Conference on the South, this collection of essays casts additional light on the southern experience and illuminates some of the directions its formal study may take in the new century. Emory Thomas opens the collection with a meditation on the shortcomings of the historical literature on the Civil War era. Essays by James McMillin, Kirsten Wood, and Patrick Breen revise estimates about the volume of the African slave trade, reveal how white widows embraced paternalism, and explore new ramifications of the fear of slave insurrection. Essays by Christopher Phillips on the birth of southern identity and by Brian Dirck and Christopher Waldrep on the key role language played in waging and in resolving the Civil War round out the discussion of the Old South. Turning to the New South, the next groups of essays examine religion and race relations during the Jim Crow era. Paul Harvey, Joan Marie Johnson, James O. Farmer Jr., and William Glass show how the beliefs of various Protestant churches - Pentecostal, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Methodist - produced surprising episodes of racial interaction, gave rise to at least one vocal c
The civil rights era was a time of pervasive change in American political and social life. Among the decisive forces driving change were lawyers, who wielded the power of law to resolve competing concepts of order and equality and, in the end, to hold out the promise of a new and better nation. The Search for Justice is a look the role of the lawyers throughout the period, focusing on one of the central issues of the time: school segregation. The most notable participants to address this issue were the public interest lawyers of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, whose counselors brought lawsuits and carried out appeals in state and federal courts over the course of twenty years. But also pla...
Reconstruction politics and race relations between freed blacks and the white establishment in Perry County, Alabama In his fascinating, in-depth study, Bertis D. English analyzes why Perry County, situated in the heart of a violence-prone subregion of Alabama, enjoyed more peaceful race relations and less bloodshed than several neighboring counties. Choosing an atypical locality as central to his study, English raises questions about factors affecting ethnic disturbances in the Black Belt and elsewhere in Alabama. He also uses Perry County, which he deems an anomalous county, to caution against the tendency of some scholars to make sweeping generalizations about entire regions and subregion...
"John Tully has done an extraordinary job tying together the disparate elements-historical, geographical, sociological, anthropological of the rubber industry. He provides a deft treatment of a complicated and typically overlooked natural (and synthetic) resource that remains fundamental to the world economy. I strongly recommend it. John Borsos, vice-president, National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW).
From the author of Race After Technology, an inspiring vision of how we can build a more just world—one small change at a time “A true gift to our movements for justice.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day. Vividly recounting her personal expe...
The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case was the start of a long period of desegregation, but Brown did not give a roadmap for how to achieve this lofty goal—it only provided the destination. In the years that followed, the path toward the fulfillment of this vision for school integration was worked out in the courts through the efforts of the NAACP Legal Defense organization and the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice. One of the major cases on this path was Lee v. Macon County Board of Education (1967). Revolution by Law traces the growth of Lee v. Macon County from a case to desegregate a single school district in rural Alabama to a decision that paved the way for...
" . . . a sweeping, analytical synethsis of collective violence from the colonial experience to the present." —American Studies "Gilje has written 'the book' on rioting throughout American history." —The Historian ". . . a thorough, illuminating, and at times harrowing account of man's inhumanity to man." —William and Mary Quarterly " . . . fulfills its title's promise as an encyclopedic study . . . an impressive accomplishment and required reading for anyone interested in America's contentious past." —Journal of the Early Republic "Gilje has written a thought-provoking survey of the social context of American riots and popular disorders from the Colonial period to the late 20th cent...