In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone’s lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked the land as slaves to the white supremacists who would bring an end to Reconstruction in the late 1870s, this crucial concept informed the ways in which many people—both black and white, northerner and southerner—imagined the transformation of the American South. Beyond Redemption explores how the violence of a protracted civil war shaped the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the new South. Here, Carole Emberton traces the competing meanings that redemption held for Americans as they tried to come to terms with the war and the changing social landscape. While some imagined redemption from the brutality of slavery and war, others—like the infamous Ku Klux Klan—sought political and racial redemption for their losses through violence. Beyond Redemption merges studies of race and American manhood with an analysis of post-Civil War American politics to offer unconventional and challenging insight into the violence of Reconstruction.

Challenging the traditional interpretation that the years between Reconstruction and World War I were a period when Blacks made only marginal advances in religion, politics, and social life, John Giggie contends that these years marked a critical turning point in the religious history of Southern Blacks.

An award-winning journalist and producer of This American Life traces the stories of five convicted murderers to assess their struggles for redemption, efforts toward parole and first steps in transitioning back to civilian life. 25,000 first printing.

Their red-hot reunion is off the charts!They made passionate music together. Has this heartbreaker changed his tune?Songwriter Eden Voss had the perfect man—sexy, charming, talented and hers. Until record executive Blaine Woodson broke her heart to save his fledging label. Now music’s bad boy is back, begging for her songwriting skills in his studio…and her lovemaking skills after hours. Eden vows to keep things strictly business this time. But there is nothing professional about the heat still between them…

Lola Leser was a privileged sixteen-year-old in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. The horrors of the Holocaust overtook her almost immediately when she moved to Krakow, Poland. Today in her eighties, Lola still paints, is a successful artist, and she is the mother of three, grandmother of twelve, and the great-grandmother of thirty-six and still counting. This truly is her triumph and her final victory over Hitler and the Reich.

Though Lyndon Johnson developed a reputation as a rough-hewn, arm-twisting deal-maker with a drawl, at a crucial moment in history he delivered an address to Congress that moved Martin Luther King Jr. to tears and earned praise from the media as the best presidential speech in American history. Even today, his voting rights address of 1965 ranks high not only in political significance, but also as an example of leadership through oratory.

In Inheritance of Loss, anthropologist Yukiko Koga tackles complex questions of how two nations previously at war come to terms with their troubled past. Her site is Northeast China, where Japan s imperial ambitions were pursued to devastating and murderous ends in the twentieth century. There the landscape, which is still peppered with missiles and unexploded chemical weapons from the war, is the backdrop for refurbished imperial architecture and revived Japanese businesses. But the national wounds of China and Japan s history problem cannot be stitched together solely through international trade. The author shows why mutual recognition of wartime atrocities is the only thing that can allay the persistent and sporadically explosive tensions between two of the most powerful countries in the Eastern hemisphere. A milestone in memory studies that incorporates sorely needed attention to materiality and political economy, Inheritance of Loss shows just how crucial imperial legacies will continue to be despite China s and Japan s attempts to leave the past behind in pursuit of a more prosperous future."

Life After Life is the haunting and gloriously redemptive tale of Evans D. Hopkins's many lives, a sweeping journey from promising middle-class youth to civil rights militant, from criminal and convict to celebrated writer and enlightened man. Evans D. Hopkins was born during the Jim Crow era in a second-rate, segregated hospital, and educated in segregated primary schools in Danville, Virginia, a town that proudly proclaimed itself the "Last Capital of the Confederacy." With parents who stressed the value of education, as a teenager he was in the forefront of desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, he fell in love with the traditionally white man's game of tennis, modeling himself after his idol, the legendary Arthur Ashe, only to be swept off the courts by the Black Panther Party at the age of sixteen. Just out of high school, Hopkins moved to Panther headquarters in Oakland, California, where he spent two years writing for the Party newspaper, covering the trial of the San Quentin Six, working with Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and taking part in their move into politics when Seale ran for mayor of Oakland. He became historian for the group, documenting the years when altercations with authorities resulted in the deaths of numerous Panthers. And he was witness to the internal strife within the Party that led to the group's decline and his own decision to leave in the fall of 1974. When he returned to Danville, Hopkins was a different man, disillusioned and filled with rage and a legacy of militancy. He was, in his own words, "the quintessential angry young black man." Convicted of armed robbery and given a life sentence, Hopkins would spend twenty of the next twenty-two years in the prisons of Virginia. Inside, fighting despair and isolation and dreaming of escape, Hopkins sought salvation in the written word, writing in his cell in the early morning hours to escape the noise of the prison. Focusing on issues of social and criminal injustice, Hopkins would begin reaching a national audience when his inside account of an execution, "Who's Afraid of Virginia's Chair," was published in The Washington Post. Paroled in 1997, Hopkins returned home, a free man at last, but facing the overwhelming challenges of caring for his aging parents and daily life in a world that was new after so many years of incarceration. In this stunning look back at a man's struggle with himself and the world around him, Life After Life is also about the influences that sustained Hopkins's development despite overwhelming odds, influences that allowed him to emerge from two decades of imprisonment an uncorrupted man, still able to give to his family and community. Finally, Life After Life is a searingly honest view of events in America in the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of a child, a militant, a prisoner, and, most important, a writer.

A century after Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. This is the story of the terrorist campaign that took them away. Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes attacked the black community there and massacred hundreds of people in a gruesome killing spree. This was the start of an insurgency that changed the course of American history: for the next few years white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism aiming to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and challenge President Grant'ssupport for the emergent structures of black political power. The remorseless strategy of well-financed "White Line" organizations was to create chaos and keep blacks from voting out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. Redemption is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875. Lemann bases his devastating account on a wealth of military records, congressional investigations, memoirs, press reports, and the invaluable papers of Adelbert Ames, the war hero from Maine who was Mississippi's governor at the time. When Ames pleaded with Grant for federal troops who could thwart the white terrorists violently disrupting Republican political activities, Grant wavered, and the result was a bloody, corrupt election in which Mississippi was "redeemed"—that is, returned to white control. Redemption makes clear that this is what led to the death of Reconstruction—and of the rights encoded in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. We are still living with the consequences.

Sequel to After Sundown: Redemption. Eric Drache is an immortal dragon slayer. His life, his duty, and his salvation over the centuries has been killing dragons - until he's assigned to protect Sabrina from a crazed stalker. Anthropologist Sabrina Reyes wants to educate the world about what dragons have done for humanity through her new tell-all book. What she doesn't want is anything to do with Eric. He loved her and left her like a used-up match, and the pain in her heart still burns bright. A dangerous threat to Sabrina's life forces herand Eric to work together, but neither is prepared for the fire that still flares between them, or a sizzling truth that could snuff out that flame forever.