The White Man S Fight

"The American negroes are the only people in the history of the world. . . . that ever became free without any effort on their own." W. E. Woodward stated this in his biography of General Ulysses S. Grant. Nothing could be farther from the truth as will be seen in this history which will show that the African Americans fighting in the Civil War may have been the deciding factor in determining the outcome.

During World War I, thousands of rural southern men, black and white, refused to serve in the military. Some failed to register for the draft, while others deserted after being inducted. In the countryside, armed bands of deserters defied local authorities; capturing them required the dispatch of federal troops into three southern states. Jeanette Keith traces southern draft resistance to several sources, including whites' long-term political opposition to militarism, southern blacks' reluctance to serve a nation that refused to respect their rights, the peace witness of southern churches, and, above all, anger at class bias in federal conscription policies. Keith shows how draft dodgers' success in avoiding service resulted from the failure of southern states to create effective mechanisms for identifying and classifying individuals. Lacking local-level data on draft evaders, the federal government used agencies of surveillance both to find reluctant conscripts and to squelch antiwar dissent in rural areas. Drawing upon rarely used local draft board reports, Selective Service archives, Bureau of Investigation reports, and southern political leaders' constituent files, Keith offers new insights into rural southern politics and society as well as the growing power of the nation-state in early twentieth-century America.

"The American negroes are the only people in the history of the world. . . . that ever became free without any effort on their own." W. E. Woodward stated this in his biography of General Ulysses S. Grant. Nothing could be farther from the truth as will be seen in this history which will show that the African Americans fighting in the Civil War may have been the deciding factor in determining the outcome.

A bold book, built of close readings, striking in its range and depth, The Signifying Eye shows Faulkner's art take shape in sweeping arcs of social, labor, and aesthetic history. Beginning with long-unpublished works (his childhood sketches and his hand-drawn and handillustrated play The Marionettes) and early novels (Mosquitoes and Sartoris), working through many major works (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!), and including more popular fictions (The Wild Palms and The Unvanquished) and late novels (notably Intruder in the Dust and The Town), The Signifying Eye reveals Faulkner's visual obsessions with artistic creation as his work is read next to Wharton, Cather, Toomer, and—in a tour de force intervention—Willem de Kooning. After coloring in southern literature as a "reverse slave narrative," Waid's Eye locates Faulkner's fiction as the "feminist hinge" in a crucial parable of art that seeks abstraction through the burial of the race-defined mother. Race is seen through gender and sexuality while social fall is exposed (in Waid's phrase) as a "coloring of class." Locating "visual language" that constitutes a "pictorial vocabulary," The Signifying Eye delights in literacy as the oral meets the written and the abstract opens as a site to see narrative. Steeped in history, this book locates a heightened reality that goes beyond representation to bring Faulkner's novels, stories, and drawings into visible form through Whistler, Beardsley, Gorky, and de Kooning. Visionary and revisionist, Waid has painted the proverbial big picture, changing the fundamental way that both the making of modernism and the avant-garde will be seen. A Friends Fund publication

Six Against the State In 1895, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina attempted to solidify his political power. He proposed to rewrite the South Carolina Constitution to deny African Americans their constitutional rights and make racial segregation the law of the state. Six Black leaders--Robert Anderson, Isaiah Reed, Robert Smalls, William J. Whipper, James Wigg and Thomas E. Miller--went to the state capitol in the face of insult and ridicule to make an eloquent stand against these developments. The erudite and forceful addresses of these men drew worldwide headlines but are largely forgotten today. Author Damon L. Fordham attempts to rectify that omission and inspire generations to come.

The story of the Marlow brothers, George, Charles, Alf and Epp, and their bloody trail through northern Texas in the 1880s.

Historians have given much attention to the Civil War’s prominent players—its generals, politicians, and other public leaders—but they have devoted less attention to the common soldiers and civilians—the “plain folk”—who actively participated in the conflict. In his study of popular thought during the Civil War era, Randall C. Jimerson offers a grass-roots perspective on the war by examining the thoughts and ideas of these ordinary men and women. The Private Civil War derives much of its power from the author’s deft use of personal letters and diaries. Separated from home and family, virtually every soldier and many civilians wrote frequent and informative letters or recorded daily experiences and thoughts in journals. Jimerson has consulted a broad cross section of these documents, culling information from letters and diaries written by people from every state and from all social classes and military ranks. These documents, remarkable in many instances for their depth of feeling and eloquence, provide rich, detailed information about sectional perceptions and ideology as well as many private reflections.