In 1879, Islay Walden, born enslaved and visually impaired, returned to North Carolina after a twelve-year odyssey in search of an education. It was a journey that would take him from emancipation in Randolph County, North Carolina to Washington, D. C., where he earned a teaching degree from Howard University, then to the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Along the way, he would publish two volumes of poetry and found two schools for African American children. Now ordained, he would return to his home community, where he founded two Congregational churches and common schools. Despite an early death at age forty, he would leave an educational and spiritual legacy that endures to this day. Born Missionary uses Walden's own words as well as newspaper reports and church publications to follow his journey from enslavement to teacher, ordained minister, missionary, and community leader.

Covering the same ground as the major motion picture The Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey, this is the extraordinary true story of the anti-slavery Southern farmer who brought together poor whites, army deserters and runaway slaves to fight the Confederacy in deepest Mississippi. "Moving and powerful." -- The Washington Post. In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth, Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against it. A pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South who refused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton, for two years he and other residents of Jones County engaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyond the scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almost forgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroic and unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within the South.