Detective Alex Cross tells the story of an ancestor, Abraham Cross, and his experiences with lawyer Ben Corbett, recounting one man's pursuit of justice in the face of the resurgence of Ku Klux Klan racism and violence in 1906 Eudora, Mississippi.

Many early-nineteenth-century slaveholders considered themselves "masters" not only over slaves, but also over the institutions of marriage and family. According to many historians, the privilege of mastery was reserved for white males. But as many as one in ten slaveholders--sometimes more--was a widow, and as Kirsten E. Wood demonstrates, slaveholding widows between the American Revolution and the Civil War developed their own version of mastery.Because...

This sprawling novel concerns the lives of two generations in one family; of their loves both licit and illicit, of their work, and of their personal triumphs and tragedies. It is a story, at first, about the three Woodruff brothers: Peter, a businessman, Leonard, an artist, and Ike, an attorney and member of Congress who risks his political career to prevent a lynching and bring justice to a black man falsely accused of murder. And it is about George...

PRAISE for A BUM DEAL

"Hannah's recollections of his mental state at the time are almost heartbreaking in their honesty and intensity...remarkable story of personal redemption."
-Booklist starred review

"Here is the remarkable story behind an American tragedy, a twisted fall into unspeakable exploitation and the hoary depths of human existence followed by a redemptive return to grace."-Steve Lopez, author of The Soloist and LA

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Researches the character of slavery, new freedom and racial relationships on both blacks and whites of the Reconstruction period.

"With the freeing of four million enslaved people after the Civil War, the Reconstruction period brought new victories and challenges in the fight for Black rights. Learn more about this crucial period in US history"--

Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain...

"The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners' national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern...

"In The souls of womenfolk, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh argues that woman-gendered cosmologies and experiences from the Upper Guinea Coast played a distinct role in shaping the religious consciousness and practices of enslaved communities in the Lower South, and that this process took place concurrently as enslaved peoples in the U.S. South interpreted their new contexts through the cosmological frameworks of their foreparents, while acquiring, innovating,...

"In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley's survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language--including Rose's wish...