While the role of the African American in American history has been written about extensively, it is often difficult to locate the wealth of material that has been published. African-Americans in Defense of the Nation builds on a long list of early bibliographies concerning the subject, bringing together a broad spectrum of titles related to the African-American participation in America's wars. It covers both military exploits—as African Americans have been involved in every American conflict since the Revolution—and their participation in the homefront support.
Jubilant at the outbreak of the Civil War and destitute in its aftermath, Lexington, Virginia, ultimately rose from the ashes to rebuild in the shadow of the conflict's legacy. It is the final resting place of two famous Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and the home of two of the South's most important war-era colleges, Washington College and the Virginia Military Institute. Author Richard G. Williams presents the trials and triumphs of Lexington during the war, including harrowing narratives of Union general Hunter's raid through the town, Lee's struggle between Union and state allegiances and Jackson's rise from professor to feared battlefield tactician.
In the nineteenth century, New York City underwent a tremendous demographic transformation driven by European immigration, the growth of a native-born population, and the expansion of one of the largest African American communities in the North. New York's free blacks were extremely politically active, lobbying for equal rights at home and an end to Southern slavery. As their activism increased, so did discrimination against them, most brutally illustrated by bloody attacks during the 1863 New York City Draft Riots. The struggle for civil rights did not extend to equal gender roles, and black male leaders encouraged women to remain in the domestic sphere, serving as caretakers, moral educators, and nurses to their families and community. Yet as Jane E. Dabel demonstrates, separate spheres were not a reality for New York City's black people, who faced dire poverty, a lopsided sex ratio, racialized violence, and a high mortality rate, all of which conspired to prevent men from gaining respectable employment and political clout. Consequently, many black women came out of the home and into the streets to work, build networks with other women, and fight against racial injustice. A Respectable Woman reveals the varied and powerful lives led by black women, who, despite the exhortations of male reformers, occupied public roles as gender and race reformers.
A new look at the Black Virginians who defined and realized their freedom after the collapse of slavery “Verily, the work does not end with the abolition of slavery,” wrote Frederick Douglass in 1862, “but only begins.” The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment altered a legal status; to make freedom a reality represented a different challenge altogether. Justice for Ourselves tells the stories of remarkable Black men and women in post–Civil War Virginia who persevered in the face of overwhelming barriers to seek their freedom and create a new world for themselves and future generations. Drawing on the life stories of individuals from all regions of the state—political leaders, teachers, ministers, journalists, and entrepreneurs—Justice for Ourselves recounts their quests to attain full American citizenship and economic independence before the onset of Jim Crow repression. Centering Black voices, this book includes tales of opportunities seized and opportunities lost and will reshape the narrative of Black history and the history of Virginia in the second half of the nineteenth century.
A wounded Confederate soldier treks across the ruins of America in this National Book Award–winning novel: “A stirring Civil War tale told with epic sweep.” —People Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His journey across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. Meanwhile, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.
