"Based on events that began in Saint-Domingue on August 21, 1791, The Saint-Domingue Plantation; or, The Insurrection vividly dramatizes the genesis and outbreak of a slave revolt. When a representati
Nothing But Freedom examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked
Ted Tunnell's superbly researched biography of Marshall H. Twitchell is a major addition to Reconstruction literature. New England native, Union soldier, Freedmen's Bureau agent, and Louisiana planter
A candidate for the office of Superintendent of Streets, Parks, and Garbage, middle-aged matron Olive Mackie of Tula Springs, Louisiana, finds her political aspirations thwarted when her ninety-one-y
Led by a coalition of blacks and whites with funding from congressional radicals, the Union League was a secret society whose express purpose was to bring freedmen into the political arena after the C
From the signing of the Constitution to the eve of the Civil War there persisted the belief that slaveholding southerners held the reins of the American national government and used their power to ens
First published in 1896, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade remains the standard work on the efforts made in the United States, from 1638 to 1870, to limit and suppress the trade in slaves bet
In late April, 1862, Union warships slipped past the Confederate river forts below New Orleans and blasted the Rebel fleet guarding the city. Advancing overland, General Benjamin F. Butler occupied Ne
The secession of the southern states from the Union was not merely a culmination of certain events; it was also the beginning of the trial of Confederate nationalism. The slaveholding elite which had
Probing the social repercussions of the industrial development of South Carolina in the decades following Reconstruction, David L. Carlton’s Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920, tells of the co
First published in 1865, Belle Boyd's memoir of her experiences as a Confederate spy has stood the test of time and interest. Belle first gained notoriety when she killed a Union soldier in her home i
Originally published in 1942, this perceptive and impartial analysis of one of the most baffling periods in American history - the months between the election of Lincoln and the fall of Fort Sumter -
Together now, the four poems River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, and Earthsleep counterpoint one another in a grand symphony, Midquest. In what he has referred to as “something like a verse novel,” Fred
Miller Williams’ Patterns of Poetry is an encyclopedia of the forms used by poets throughout the history of English, from blank verse to hymnal measure, from englyn penfyr to the double dactyl, from t
Solomon Northup was a free man, the son of an emancipated Negro Slave. Until the spring of 1841 he lived a simple, uneventful life with his wife and three children in Upstate New York. Then, suddenly,
