"The astonishing story of the longest and most decisive military campaign of the Civil War in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which opened the Mississippi River, split the Confederacy, freed tens of thousands of slaves, and made Ulysses S. Grant the most important general of the war. Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the last stronghold of the Confederacy on the Mississippi River. It prevented the Union from using the river for shipping between the Union-controlled...

"An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South--and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America"--

"In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people's connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. In the 1920s, there were over one million black farmers; today there are just 45,000. Baszile explores this crisis, through the farmers' personal experiences. In their own words, middle aged and elderly black farmers explain why...

"An authoritative biography of the second-highest-ranking and most controversial Confederate general, who rejoined the Union after the Civil War, advising other Confederate soldiers to put that war behind them. After joining an interracial government in New Orleans, Longstreet fought against white supremacists when they attacked these postwar elected officials, for which he was vilified and attacked by other Southerners, and blamed for the South's...

Veteran journalist Douglas Waller turns his sights on the shadow war of four secret agents for the North, three men and one woman. From the tense days before Abraham Lincoln's inauguration in 1861 to the surrender at Appomattox four years later, Waller delivers a fast-paced narrative of the heroes, and scoundrels, who informed Lincoln's generals on the enemy positions for crucial battles and busted up clandestine Rebel networks.

"J. Nicole Jones is the only daughter of a prominent South Carolina family, a family that grew rich building the hotels and seafood restaurants that draw tourists to Myrtle Beach. But at home, she is surrounded by violence and capriciousness: a grandfather who beats his wife, a barman father who dreams of being a country music star. At one time, Jones's parents can barely afford groceries; at another, her volatile grandfather presents her with a fur...

"The little-known story of an iconic photographer, whose work captured--and influenced--a critical moment in American history. Ernest Withers took some of the most legendary images of the 1950s and 60s: Martin Luther King Jr. riding a newly integrated bus in Montgomery, Alabama; Emmett Till's uncle pointing an accusatory finger across the courtroom at his nephew's killer. But from his position at the heart of the cultural revolution, Withers was simultaneously...

"Visiting Martin Luther King, Jr. at the peak of the civil rights movement, the journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self-defense," King assured him. One of King's advisors remembered the reverend's home as "an arsenal." Like King, many nonviolent activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection-yet this crucial dimension of the civil rights struggle has been long ignored. In This Nonviolent Stuff'll...

"Even at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when the clarion call for equality and justice echoed around the country, few volunteers ventured into Clarke County, Mississippi. Fewer still remained. Located just south of Neshoba County, where three civil rights workers had been murdered during 1964's Freedom Summer, Clarke lay squarely in what many considered Mississippi's, and thus America's, meanest corner. Local African Americans...