An African American novelist recounts her family history, which includes both white and black ancestors who were pioneers, slaves, and Confederate soldiers and lived in such places as Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, and Virginia.

Starting from a photograph and writings left by her grandmother, African-Amer. novelist Thulani Davis goes looking for the ¿white folk¿ in her family, a Scots-Irish clan of cotton planters unknown to her -- and uncovers a history far richer and stranger than she had ever imagined. Along the way she finds tartan plaid, unlikely lovers, a lynching close to home, and Confederate soldiers. Her journey challenges us to examine the origins of some of our most deeply ingrained notions about what makes a family black or white, and offers an immensely compelling, intellectually challenging alternative. ¿A gripping historical tale that is uniquely, tragically American.¿ ¿Underlines a subject that tends to make people uncomfortable -- this nation¿s knotty racial ties.¿ Photos.

In The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.

This interdisciplinary investigation argues that since the 1990s, discourses about mixed-race heritage in the United States have taken the shape of a veritable literary genre, here termed “memoir of the search.” The study uses four different texts to explore this non-fictional genre, including Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family and Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice. All feature a protagonist using methods from archival investigation to DNA-testing to explore an intergenerational family secret; photographs and family trees; and the trip to the American South, which is identified as the site of the secret’s origin and of the family’s past. As a genre, these texts negotiate the memory of slavery and segregation in the present. In taking up central narratives of Americanness, such as the American Dream and the Immigrant story, as well as discourses generating the American family, the texts help inscribe themselves and the mixed-race heritage they address into the American mainstream. In its outlook, this book highlights the importance of the memoirs’ negotiations of the past when finding ways to remember after the last witnesses have passed away. and contributes to the discussion over political justice and reparations for slavery.

For Kentuckians, the Civil War was truly a conflict of brother against brother. As a slave state bordering the United States and the Confederate States, Kentucky had ties to both the North and South. Although its state government remained in the Union, the people of Kentucky were divided in sentiment, prompting some 40,000 Kentuckians to leave their homes to fight for Southern independence. When Confederate soldiers eventually returned from the country's bloodiest war, they were held in high regard by their fellow Kentuckians. To be counted among the state's Confederate veterans was an honor, and when the number of living Confederate veterans began to dwindle, groups across Kentucky raised monuments to their memory. Remembering Kentucky's Confederates presents an overview of the state's Confederate soldiers and units who fought bravely in the War Between the States.

The Civil War was a flashpoint in the history of America. This volume is a collection of three stories that show the commitment and valor of those young people who fought and died experiencing the horrors of war. The Forgotten Confederate Sentry is a story told by the ghost of a rebel soldier to a cadre of Union soldiers buried alongside him in a small rural Pennsylvania cemetery. As he has stood sentry duty for almost 140 years, he tells them of his love for his retarded younger brother and the promises he made to him as they fought valiantly along side of one another at the battle of Antietam. Mattie Anderson tells the story of a young girl from Illinois who joins up with a local Union regiment, hiding her femininity in the guise of a young man, in order to seek her older brother whom she believes joined the rebel army. She ultimately carries a secret message back to her commanding officer that contributes to the end of the war. The third story is a true story of a young Pennsylvanian Union officer, Andrew Gregg Tucker, a graduate of what is now Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, who brings glory and honor to his name through his heroic death at the battle of Gettysburg.

The masterful and poignant story of three African-American families who journeyed west after emancipation, by an award-winning scholar and descendant of the migrants Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field's epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom's first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements. When statehood, oil speculation, and Jim Crow segregation imperiled their lives and livelihoods, these formerly enslaved men and women again chose emigration. Some migrants launched a powerful back-to-Africa movement, while others moved on to Canada and Mexico. Their lives and choices deepen and widen the roots of the Great Migration. Interweaving black, white, and Indian histories, Field's beautifully wrought narrative explores how ideas about race and color powerfully shaped the pursuit of freedom.

Reconstruction politics and race relations between freed blacks and the white establishment in Perry County, Alabama In his fascinating, in-depth study, Bertis D. English analyzes why Perry County, situated in the heart of a violence-prone subregion of Alabama, enjoyed more peaceful race relations and less bloodshed than several neighboring counties. Choosing an atypical locality as central to his study, English raises questions about factors affecting ethnic disturbances in the Black Belt and elsewhere in Alabama. He also uses Perry County, which he deems an anomalous county, to caution against the tendency of some scholars to make sweeping generalizations about entire regions and subregions. English contends Perry County was a relatively tranquil place with a set of extremely influential African American businessmen, clergy, politicians, and other leaders during Reconstruction. Together with egalitarian or opportunistic white citizens, they headed a successful campaign for black agency and biracial cooperation that few counties in Alabama matched. English also illustrates how a significant number of educational institutions, a high density of African American residents, and an unusually organized and informed African American population were essential factors in forming Perry County’s character. He likewise traces the development of religion in Perry, the nineteenth-century Baptist capital of Alabama, and the emergence of civil rights in Perry, an underemphasized center of activism during the twentieth century. This well-researched and comprehensive volume illuminates Perry County’s history from the various perspectives of its black, interracial, and white inhabitants, amplifying their own voices in a novel way. The narrative includes rich personal details about ordinary and affluent people, both free and unfree, creating a distinctive resource that will be useful to scholars as well as a reference that will serve the needs of students and general readers.

Mississippi. The 1950s and ’60s. Two friends, one white and the other black. Sue Ann spends her pre-adolescent years protecting her best friend, Liz Bess, from prejudice and mistreatment, but she can’t protect her from the untimely death of her mother and their resulting separation as Liz Bess is sent north to school. As a young adult, Sue Ann falls in love with Tate Douglas, a civil rights worker from the North, during the violent summer of 1964. Liz Bess, now Elizabeth, returns to Mississippi to become a freedom fighter for her people and comes face to face with racist violence and death. Through the turmoil, Sue Ann is reminded of the words of Elizabeth’s grandmother: “Love ain’t black, and love ain’t white; it jes’ is.”