As the country enters a new era of conversations around race and the enduring impact of slavery, The Hairstons traces the rise and fall of the largest slaveholding family in the Old South as its descendants-both black and white-grapple with the twisted legacy of their past. Spanning two centuries of one family's history, The Hairstons tells the extraordinary story of the Hairston clan, once the wealthiest family in the Old South and the largest slaveholder...

Anne McCarty Braden (1924–2006) rejected her segregationist, privileged past to become one of the civil rights movement's staunchest white allies.

In 1954 she was charged with sedition by McCarthyist politicians who played on fears of communism to preserve southern segregation. Though Braden remained controversial―even within the civil rights movement―in 1963 she became one of only five white southerners whose contributions to the

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Thomas A. Underwood, a native of Texas, teaches at Harvard University. A frequent lecturer on Southern history and literature, he has also taught at Columbia, Boston, and Yale universities. Despite his celebrity and his fame, a series of literary feuds and the huge volume of sources have, until now, precluded a satisfying biography of Allen Tate. Anyone interested in the literature and history of the American South, or in modern letters, will be...

Hadjii remembers the trials and tribulations of youth in Don't Let My Mama Read This. From the havoc that a boy's crusty underwear can wreak on a family's reputation to the first time getting caught coming home drunk, Hadjii covers all the aspects of a "blessedly normal" childhood.

This book is the author's Civil War diary from February 18, 1861, to June 26, 1865. She was an eyewitness to many historic events as she accompanied her husband to significant sites of the Civil War.

This vivid work, first published by UNC Press in 1954, reveals General Joseph Orville Shelby as one of the best Confederate cavalry leaders--and certainly the most colorful. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, but drawn by the promise of the growing West, Shelby became one of the richest men in Missouri. Siding with the Confederacy at the outbreak of the Civil War, he organized his Iron Brigade of cavalry--whose ranks included Frank and Jesse James--taught...

Jeb Stuart: The Last Cavalier is a full and definitive biography of the dashing and enigmatic Confederate hero of the Civil War, General J.E.B. Stuart. This life-sized portrait of Stuart surveys his life from childhood through his training at West Point, his years on the Western frontier, and his decision to stand with Virginia when war arrived. His brilliant Civil War career is covered in detail, from the raid on Chambersburg to his final, fatal...

A sweeping epidemic of hate crime targeted over one hundred Southern Black Churches between 1995 and 1996, leaving them in charred ruins. St. John Baptist Church in Dixiana, South Carolina, was one of the first destroyed. This small, isolated church had faced dark times before. It had been viciously desecrated in 1985 and withstood more attacks until it was burned down in August 1995. From the beginning, two friends-a white woman named Ammie Murray,...

Even forty years after the civil rights movement, the transition from son and grandson of Klansmen to field secretary of SNCC seems quite a journey. In the early 1960s, when Bob Zellner's professors and classmates at a small church school in Alabama thought he was crazy for even wanting to do research on civil rights, it was nothing short of remarkable. Now, in his long-awaited memoir, Zellner tells how one white Alabamian joined ranks with the black...