Battle of Liberty Place


Book Description

The cause of the Battle of Liberty Place was the result of several years of the troubled Reconstruction period, the coerced adoption of the 14 th Amendment, and the stealing of elections and the injustices of the carpetbag regime forced upon Louisiana by the Federal authorities. In particular, the usurpation of the State government in 1873 by Governor William Pitt Kellog and his "Custom House gang" contributed significantly to the events that led up to the battle.




New Orleans after the Civil War


Book Description

We often think of Reconstruction as an unfinished revolution. Justin A. Nystrom’s original study of the aftermath of emancipation in New Orleans takes a different perspective, arguing that the politics of the era were less of a binary struggle over political supremacy and morality than they were about a quest for stability in a world rendered uncertain and unfamiliar by the collapse of slavery. Commercially vibrant and racially unique before the Civil War, New Orleans after secession and following Appomattox provides an especially interesting case study in political and social adjustment. Taking a generational view and using longitudinal studies of some of the major political players of the era, New Orleans after the Civil War asks fundamentally new questions about life in the post–Civil War South: Who would emerge as leaders in the prostrate but economically ambitious city? How would whites who differed over secession come together over postwar policy? Where would the mixed-race middle class and newly freed slaves fit in the new order? Nystrom follows not only the period’s broad contours and occasional bloody conflicts but also the coalition building and the often surprising liaisons that formed to address these and related issues. His unusual approach breaks free from the worn stereotypes of Reconstruction to explore the uncertainty, self-doubt, and moral complexity that haunted Southerners after the war. This probing look at a generation of New Orleanians and how they redefined a society shattered by the Civil War engages historical actors on their own terms and makes real the human dimension of life during this difficult period in American history.




Warfare and Armed Conflicts


Book Description

In its revised and updated fourth edition, this exhaustive encyclopedia provides a record of casualties of war from the last five centuries through 2015, with new statistical and analytical information. Figures include casualties from global terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fight against the Islamic State. New entries cover an additional 20 armed conflicts between 1492 and 2007 not included in previous editions. Arranged roughly by century and subdivided by world region, chronological entries include the name and dates of the conflict, precursor events, strategies and details, the outcome and its aftermath.




Life of a Klansman


Book Description

"A haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today . . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance." —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review A 2020 NPR staff pick | One of The New York Times' thirteen books to watch for in August | One of The Washington Post's ten books to read in August | A Literary Hub best book of the summer| One of Kirkus Reviews' sixteen best books to read in August The life and times of a militant white supremacist, written by one of his offspring, National Book Award–winner Edward Ball Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his family’s anti-black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail. Sifting through family lore about “our Klansman” as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A white French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages—all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-white view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by “our Klansman” and his comrades, and shares their stories. For whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that fifty percent of whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history. That is, one-half of white Americans could write a Klan family memoir, if they wished. In an era when racist ideology and violence are again loose in the public square, Life of a Klansman offers a personal origin story of white supremacy. Ball’s family memoir traces the vines that have grown from militant roots in the Old South into the bitter fruit of the present, when whiteness is again a cause that can veer into hate and domestic terror.




Written in Stone


Book Description

Twentieth Anniversary Edition with a new preface and afterword From the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans in the spring of 2017 to the violent aftermath of the white nationalist march on the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville later that summer, debates and conflicts over the memorialization of Confederate “heroes” have stormed to the forefront of popular American political and cultural discourse. In Written in Stone Sanford Levinson considers the tangled responses to controversial monuments and commemorations while examining how those with political power configure public spaces in ways that shape public memory and politics. Paying particular attention to the American South, though drawing examples as well from elsewhere in the United States and throughout the world, Levinson shows how the social and legal arguments regarding the display, construction, modification, and destruction of public monuments mark the seemingly endless confrontation over the symbolism attached to public space. This twentieth anniversary edition of Written in Stone includes a new preface and an extensive afterword that takes account of recent events in cities, schools and universities, and public spaces throughout the United States and elsewhere. Twenty years on, Levinson's work is more timely and relevant than ever.







Tearing Down the Lost Cause


Book Description

In Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans's Confederate Statues James Gill and Howard Hunter examine New Orleans’s complicated relationship with the history of the Confederacy pre– and post–Civil War. The authors open and close their manuscript with the dramatic removal of the city’s Confederate statues. On the eve of the Civil War, New Orleans was far more cosmopolitan than Southern, with its sizable population of immigrants, Northern-born businessmen, and white and Black Creoles. Ambivalent about secession and war, the city bore divided loyalties between the Confederacy and the Union. However, by 1880 New Orleans rivaled Richmond as a bastion of the Lost Cause. After Appomattox, a significant number of Confederate veterans moved into the city giving elites the backing to form a Confederate civic culture. While it’s fair to say that the three Confederate monuments and the white supremacist Liberty Monument all came out of this dangerous nostalgia, the authors argue that each monument embodies its own story and mirrors the city and the times. The Lee monument expressed the bereavement of veterans and a desire to reconcile with the North, though strictly on their own terms. The Davis monument articulated the will of the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association to solidify the Lost Cause and Southern patriotism. The Beauregard Monument honored a local hero, but also symbolized the waning of French New Orleans and rising Americanization. The Liberty Monument, throughout its history, represented white supremacy and the cruel hypocrisy of celebrating a past that never existed. While the book is a narrative of the rise and fall of the four monuments, it is also about a city engaging history. Gill and Hunter contextualize these statues rather than polarize, interviewing people who are on both sides including citizens, academics, public intellectuals, and former mayor Mitch Landrieu. Using the statues as a lens, the authors construct a compelling narrative that provides a larger cultural history of the city.




The Bloody Shirt


Book Description

A narrative account of Reconstruction-era violence documents vigilante attacks on African Americans and their white allies, in a fast-paced analysis that traces the period as reflected by the careers of two Union officers, a Confederate general, a northern entrepreneur, and a former slave.




The Gettysburg Address


Book Description

The complete text of one of the most important speeches in American history, delivered by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln arrived at the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to remember not only the grim bloodshed that had just occurred there, but also to remember the American ideals that were being put to the ultimate test by the Civil War. A rousing appeal to the nation’s better angels, The Gettysburg Address remains an inspiring vision of the United States as a country “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”




Rising Up from Indian Country


Book Description

“Sets the record straight about the War of 1812’s Battle of Fort Dearborn and its significance to early Chicago’s evolution . . . informative, ambitious” (Publishers Weekly). In August 1812, Capt. Nathan Heald began the evacuation of ninety-four people from the isolated outpost of Fort Dearborn. After traveling only a mile and a half, they were attacked by five hundred Potawatomi warriors, who killed fifty-two members of Heald’s party and burned Fort Dearborn before returning to their villages. In the first book devoted entirely to this crucial period, noted historian Ann Durkin Keating richly recounts the Battle of Fort Dearborn while situating it within the nearly four decades between the 1795 Treaty of Greenville and the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. She tells a story not only of military conquest but of the lives of people on all sides of the conflict, highlighting such figures as Jean Baptiste Point de Sable and John Kinzie and demonstrating that early Chicago was a place of cross-cultural reliance among the French, the Americans, and the Native Americans. This gripping account of the birth of Chicago “opens up a fascinating vista of lost American history” and will become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the city and its complex origins (The Wall Street Journal). “Laid out with great insight and detail . . . Keating . . . doesn’t see the attack 200 years ago as a massacre. And neither do many historians and Native American leaders.” —Chicago Tribune “Adds depth and breadth to an understanding of the geographic, social, and political transitions that occurred on the shores of Lake Michigan in the early 1800s.” —Journal of American History