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In May, 1921, Joseph Rini and five other men of Italian descent drove from New Orleans to Independence, Louisiana, in a stolen car to attempt the late-night robbery of an Independence bank. During the confused events of that night, a local businessman was shot by an unknown assailant, and the six men were shortly thereafter captured and charged with murder, largely on the basis of circumstantial evidence. They were found guilty. When this verdict was appealed and the state supreme court reversed it on a technicality, a second trial in May, 1922, ended with an identical decision and sentence. A series of fruitless appeals followed, and on May 9, 1924, the prisoners were hanged in Amite Cityâ€...
This dazzling collection of original essays from some of the country's leading thinkers asks the rather intriguing question - Are Italians White? Each piece carefully explores how, when and why whiteness became important to Italian Americans, and the significance of gender, class and nation to racial identity.
Approximately 70,000 Italian immigrants arrived in the Port of New Orleans between 1898 and 1929. They brought with them a yearning, a hunger for the things they valued: bread, respect, fortune, security, beauty, justice, and drama. Impoverished conditions in Sicily lead its people to respond to Louisiana plantersï¿1/2 pleas for workers, and the transported Sicilians were then able start new lives, rising quickly to become leaders in their communities. This is bread. There were few opportunities for land ownership in Sicily and overcrowding in the urban slums into which immigrants in other parts of the country came. In Louisiana, these immigrants largely settled in rural areas, and before ...
On Thanksgiving night, 1915, a small band of hooded men gathered atop Stone Mountain, an imposing granite butte just outside Atlanta. With a flag fluttering in the wind beside them, a Bible open to the twelfth chapter of Romans, and a flaming cross to light the night sky above, William Joseph Simmons and his disciples proclaimed themselves the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, named for the infamous secret order in which many of their fathers had served after the Civil War. Unsure of their footing in the New South and longing for the provincial, patriarchal world of the past, the men of the second Klan saw themselves as an army in training for a war between the races. They boasted that they h...
Lynchings: Extralegal Violence in Florida during the 1930s This study examines the 13 lynchings that occurred in the southern state of Florida during the decade of the 1930s. It provides a lively and detailed narrative account of each lynching and concludes that there is no one single theory or explanation of these extralegal executions. The author does, however, reveal several patterns common to these separate acts of vigilantism. For example, most Florida lynchings were not rural, small-town ceremonial hangings of black males accused of sexual offenses. Rather, the majority of lynch victims were forcibly seized from police and shot by small bands of carefully organized vigilantes rather than frenzied mobs. Moreover, one third of these lynchings occurred in urban areas. The study finishes with a brief overview of the three Florida lynchings of the 1940s and the sudden end of this southern lynch law in modern America.
The U.S. South is a distinctive political and cultural force -- not only in the eyes of Americans, but also in the estimation of many Europeans. The region played a distinctive role as a major agricultural center and the source of much of the wealth in early America, but it has also served as a catalyst for the nation's only civil war, and later, as a battleground in violent civil rights conflicts. Once considered isolated and benighted by the international community, the South has recently evoked considerable interest among popular audiences and academic observers on both sides of the Atlantic. In The U.S. South and Europe, editors Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg have assembled cont...
Thomas Jefferson once envisioned the United States as a 'nation of yeomen farmers'. Looking around today, however, illustrates that nothing could be further from the truth. In a globalised world and techno-centred society, urban sprawl is overtaking rural America. For over a century, farming was the backbone of the American economy, and though it is still critical to American productivity, many rural areas are plagued by poverty and job reduction. Agricultural issues have a hold over national politics (as in the debates over farm subsidies), but they cannot change several significant trends in America today: the movement toward fewer and larger farms, environmental pressures from urban and s...
"It incarnates every unclean beast of lust, guile, falsehood, murder, despotism and spiritual wickedness." So wrote a prominent Southern Baptist official in 1899 of Mormonism. Rather than the "quintessential American religion," as it has been dubbed by contemporary scholars, in the late nineteenth century Mormonism was America's most vilified homegrown faith. A vast national campaign featuring politicians, church leaders, social reformers, the press, women's organizations, businessmen, and ordinary citizens sought to end the distinctive Latter-day Saint practice of plural marriage, and to extinguish the entire religion if need be. Placing the movement against polygamy in the context of Ameri...