From its settlement in the late 1700s, the Black Patch-an agricultural region of western Kentucky and Middle Tennessee-has been known for its dark-fired, heavy-leafed tobacco, so green that it is called "black." But as the settlers of this region sowed the seeds of tobacco, they also sowed the seeds of violence. In Violence in the Black Patch of Kentucky and Tennessee, Suzanne Marshall provides a thorough, engrossing depiction of the role played by violence in the development of the Black Patch culture. Violence was a key element in the white settlement of this frontier wilderness. After forcibly removing Native Americans from the region, white settlers established a tradition of violence that maintained order and morality. White male dominance over family members and black slaves was also sustained by violence. A man's mean reputation defined his identity and place within the community, instilling respect and fear among outsiders. The Civil War and the industrial revolution also helped perpetuate violence in the Black Patch. With markedly divided sympathies during the Civil War, the Black Patch inspired guerrilla warfare against citizens and slaves by renegade bands of former soldiers from both sides. Marshall's study culminates with a discussion of the Night Riders' vigilante activity during Black Patch wars that originated with this country's shift from an agricultural society to an industrial one. By focusing on the violence in this culture, Marshall provides a key to understanding both the cultural components that were unique to the area and those that were shared with other isolated rural communities. She draws extensively from oral history and ethnographic methodology as well as court records, church records, diaries, and newspapers. Anecdotes depicting folk beliefs and heroes, old-time religion, the economics of farm life, race relations, and gender roles, serve to enliven this study and enrich our understanding of a fascinating and distinctive region.

An account of the Black Tobacco wars of Kentucky and Tennessee told by a participant, John G. Miller, who was an attorney that represented plaintiffs against "Night Riders," the enforcers of local tobacco associations.

Shortly after 1900, tens of thousands of tobacco growers throughout Kentucky and Tennessee convulsed the region for nearly a decade in a revolt against the monopolistic practices of the American Tobacco Company. Though the revolt known as the Tobacco Wars remains one of the more remarkable insurgencies of rural America, it is also one of the more misunderstood. In this first major account of the uprising in over half a century, Tracy Campbell tells the story of these embattled farmers and casts a provocative new light on the issues that fueled the Tobacco Wars. When tobacco prices fell below the cost of production in the early 1900s, farmers in western Kentucky and Tennessee, faced with desperate economic circumstances, formed cooperatives through which they could pool their crops and withhold tobacco from the market until a satisfactory price was offered. Campbell recounts the organizational underpinnings of the notorious "Black Patch War" and the forces that drove farmers to seek violent solutions to their economic ills. Campbell then expands the story to the burley region, where a simultaneous movement was under way. In 1908, over thirty thousand burley growers undertook the only successful large-scale agricultural strike in American history. Campbell brings this drama to life and describes the emotional day when the farmers achieved their unprecedented victory over the powerful Tobacco Trust. The Tobacco Wars represented one of the last desperate gasps from the countryside before the onset of "agribusiness" drove millions of farmers and their families away for good. The Politics of Despair thus stands as a unique reminder of a tradition of protest that has, perhaps, been irretrievably lost. This book will interest not only rural and labor historians and students of the American South but anyone concerned with the profound issues surrounding the decline of rural America.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Finalist for the Costa Biography Award and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Named a Best Book of 2018 by Esquire and Foreign Policy. An Amazon Best Book of November, the Guardian Bookshop Book of November, and one of the Evening Standard's Books to Read in November "Now, thanks to Hilsum’s deeply reported and passionately written book, [Marie Colvin] has the full accounting that she deserves." --Joshua Hammer, The New York Times The inspiring and devastating biography of Marie Colvin, the foremost war reporter of her generation, who was killed in Syria in 2012, and whose life story also forms the basis of the feature film A Private War, starring Rosamund Pike as Colvin. When Marie Colvin was killed in an artillery attack in Homs, Syria, in 2012, at age fifty-six, the world lost a fearless and iconoclastic war correspondent who covered the most significant global calamities of her lifetime. In Extremis, written by her fellow reporter Lindsey Hilsum, is a thrilling investigation into Colvin’s epic life and tragic death based on exclusive access to her intimate diaries from age thirteen to her death, interviews with people from every corner of her life, and impeccable research. After growing up in a middle-class Catholic family on Long Island, Colvin studied with the legendary journalist John Hersey at Yale, and eventually started working for The Sunday Times of London, where she gained a reputation for bravery and compassion as she told the stories of victims of the major conflicts of our time. She lost sight in one eye while in Sri Lanka covering the civil war, interviewed Gaddafi and Arafat many times, and repeatedly risked her life covering conflicts in Chechnya, East Timor, Kosovo, and the Middle East. Colvin lived her personal life in extremis, too: bold, driven, and complex, she was married twice, took many lovers, drank and smoked, and rejected society’s expectations for women. Despite PTSD, she refused to give up reporting. Like her hero Martha Gellhorn, Colvin was committed to bearing witness to the horrifying truths of war, and to shining a light on the profound suffering of ordinary people caught in the midst of conflict. Lindsey Hilsum’s In Extremis is a devastating and revelatory biography of one of the greatest war correspondents of her generation.

A non-fictional tale of the Kentucky and Tennessee tobacco wars and farmers' revolt against the impoverishing tobacco prices of the "Duke Trust." Story of James B. Duke's tobacco empire and Dr. David Amoss from Kentucky, who led the secret organiztion known as the "Night Riders.

The story of the Night Riders is an important episode in the history of the Kentucky Black Tobacco Belt. In an attempt to protect their most valuable money crop from the exploitation of capitalistic trusts, law-abiding farmers organized and resorted to the use of illegal force to prevent buying and selling except through their own agency, The Black Tobacco Association. This is the story of the breaking of their rule of terror and the reestablishment of law. Originally published in 1936. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

New York City's Lower East Side was a well-known landing strip for recent arrivals in the United States. For more than a century it was home to thriving communities of artists, radicals and working class families. In a gripping series of fictionalized accounts, political artist Seth Tobocman illustrates the L.E.S. of the late 80s an era of homelessness and gentrification, ACT UP and the AIDS epidemic, tent cities and squatted apartment buildings, street brawls between punks and skinheads and, above all, an emerging gulf between rich and poor. "

A reassessment of the vigilante bands that sought to force small, independent-minded tobacco growers to adhere to practices that would benefit the larger farmers in areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, and Missouri. Argues that they were not against modernization, but wanted to maintain their elite status by engaging in the national market while keeping their black workers cheap and dependent. The chapters have been published previously as articles. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Updated with New Information and Additional Patches They’re on the shoulders of all military personnel: patches showing what a soldier’s unit does. But what if that’s top secret? “A glimpse of [the Pentagon’s] dark world through a revealing lens—patches—the kind worn on military uniforms. . . The book offers not only clues into the nature of the secret programs, but also a glimpse of zealous male bonding among the presumed elite of the military-industrial complex. The patches often feel like fraternity pranks gone ballistic.” —William Broad, The New York Times I COULD TELL YOU. . . is a bestselling collection of more than seventy military patches representing secret government projects. Here author/photographer/investigator Trevor Paglen explores classified weapons projects and intelligence operations by scrutinizing their own imagery and jargon, disclosing new facts about important military units, which are here known by peculiar names (“Goat Suckers,” “Grim Reapers,” “Tastes Like Chicken”) and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. The precisely photographed patches—worn by military personnel working on classified missions, such as those at the legendary Area 51—reveal much about a strange and eerie world about which little was previously known. “A fresh approach to secret government.” —Steven Aftergood, The Federation of American Scientists “An impressive collection.” —Justin Rood, ABC News “A fascinating set of shoulder patches.” —Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report “I was fascinated... [Paglen] has assembled about 40 colorful patch insignia from secret, military ‘black’ programs that are hardly ever discussed in public. He has plenty of regalia from the real denizens of Area 51.” —Alex Beam, The Boston Globe

Up from the Mudsills of Hell analyzes agrarian activism in Tennessee from the 1870s to 1915 within the context of farmers’ lives, community institutions, and familial and communal networks. Locating the origins of the agrarian movements in the state’s late antebellum and post-Civil War farm economy, Connie Lester traces the development of rural reform from the cooperative efforts of the Grange, the Agricultural Wheel, and the Farmers’ Alliance through the insurgency of the People’s Party and the emerging rural bureaucracy of the Cooperative Extension Service and the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. Lester ties together a rich and often contradictory history of cooperativism, prohibition, disfranchisement, labor conflicts, and third-party politics to show that Tennessee agrarianism was more complex and threatening to the established political and economic order than previously recognized. As farmers reached across gender, racial, and political boundaries to create a mass movement, they shifted the ground under the monoliths of southern life. Once the Democratic Party had destroyed the insurgency, farmers responded in both traditional and progressive ways. Some turned inward, focusing on a localism that promoted--sometimes through violence--rigid adherence to established social boundaries. Others, however, organized into the Farmers’ Union, whose membership infiltrated the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and the Cooperative Extension Service. Acting through these bureaucracies, Tennessee agrarian leaders exerted an important influence over the development of agricultural legislation for the twentieth century. Up from the Mudsills of Hell not only provides an important reassessment of agrarian reform and radicalism in Tennessee, but also links this Upper South state into the broader sweep of southern and American farm movements emerging in the late nineteenth century.