Author: Frank Richard Prassel
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806128429
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
This book explores in depth the origins, development, and prospects of outlawry and of the relationship of outlaws to the social conditions of changing times. Throughout American history you will find larger-than-life brigands in every period and every region. Often, because we hunger for simple justice, we romanticize them to the point of being unable to separate fact from fiction. Frank Richard Prassel brings this home in a thorough and fascinating examination of the concept of outlawry from Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, and Blackbeard through Jean Lafitte, Pancho Villa, and Billy the Kid to more modern personalities such as John Dillinger, Claude Dallas, and D. B. Cooper. A separate chapter on molls, plus equal treatment in the histories of gangs, traces women's involvement in outlaw activities. Prassel covers the folklore as well as the facts, even including an appendix of ballads by and about outlaws. He makes clear how this motley group of bandits, pirates, highwaymen, desperadoes, rebels, hoodlums, renegades, gangsters, and fugitives—who stand tall in myth—wither in the light of truth, but flourish in the movies. As he tells the stories, there is little to confirm that Jesse and Frank James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Daltons, Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Belle Starr, the Apache Kid, or any of the so-called good badmen, did anything that did not enrich or otherwise benefit themselves. But there is plenty of evidence, in the form of slain victims and ruined lives, to show how many ways they caused harm. The Great American Outlaw is as much an excellent survey on the phenomenon as it is a brilliant exposition of the larger than-life figures who created it. Above all, it is a tribute to that aspect of humanity that Americans admire most and that Prassel describes as a willingness "to fight, however hopelessly, against exhibitions of privilege."
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Author: James Phelan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Tennessee
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
Author: Chris Raczkowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108548431
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.
Author: David J. Libby
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604730501
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
American history -- African American studies In the popular imagination the picture of slavery, frozen in time, is one of huge cotton plantations and opulent mansions. However, in over a hundred years of history detailed in this book, the hard reality of slavery in Mississippi's antebellum world is strikingly different from the one of popular myth. It shows that Mississippi's past was never frozen, but always fluid. It shows too that slavery took a number of shapes before its form in the late antebellum mold became crystalized for popular culture. The colonial French introduced African slaves into this borderlands region situated on the periphery of French, Spanish, and English empires. In this frontier, planter society made unsuccessful attempts to produce tobacco, lumber, and indigo. Slavery outlasted each failed harvest. Through each era plantation culture rode the back of a system far removed from the romantic stereotype. Almost simultaneously as Mississippi became a United States territory in the 1790s, cotton became the cash crop. The booming King Cotton economy changed Mississippi and adapted the slave system that was its foundation. Some Mississippi slaves resisted this grim oppression and rebelled by flight, work slowdowns, arson, and conspiracies. In 1835 a slave conspiracy in Madison County provoked such draconian response among local slave holders that planters throughout the state redoubled the iron locks on the system. Race relations in the state remained radicalized for many generations to follow. Beginning with the arrival of the first African slaves in the colony and extending over 115 years, this book is the first such history since Charles Sydnor's Slavery in Mississippi (1933). David J. Libby, an independent scholar, lives in San Antonio, Texas. His work has been published in CrossRoads: A Journal of Southern Culture.
Author: Joshua D. Rothman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
In 1834 Virgil Stewart rode from western Tennessee to a territory known as the "Arkansas morass" in pursuit of John Murrell, a thief accused of stealing two slaves. Stewart's adventure led to a sensational trial and a wildly popular published account that would ultimately help trigger widespread violence during the summer of 1835, when five men accused of being professional gamblers were hanged in Vicksburg, nearly a score of others implicated with a gang of supposed slave thieves were executed in plantation districts, and even those who tried to stop the bloodshed found themselves targeted as dangerous and subversive. Using Stewart's story as his point of entry, Joshua D. Rothman details why these events, which engulfed much of central and western Mississippi, came to pass. He also explains how the events revealed the fears, insecurities, and anxieties underpinning the cotton boom that made Mississippi the most seductive and exciting frontier in the Age of Jackson. As investors, settlers, slaves, brigands, and fortune-hunters converged in what was then America's Southwest, they created a tumultuous landscape that promised boundless opportunity and spectacular wealth. Predicated on ruthless competition, unsustainable debt, brutal exploitation, and speculative financial practices that looked a lot like gambling, this landscape also produced such profound disillusionment and conflict that it contained the seeds of its own potential destruction. Rothman sheds light on the intertwining of slavery and capitalism in the period leading up to the Panic of 1837, highlighting the deeply American impulses underpinning the evolution of the slave South and the dizzying yet unstable frenzy wrought by economic flush times. It is a story with lessons for our own day. Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.
Author: Matthew J. Clavin
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479823244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
"In the early United States, the language and symbols of American freedom inspired enslaved people and their allies to wage a real and revolutionary war against slavery"--
Author: H. R. Hoeward
Publisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9781330199367
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Excerpt from The History of Virgil A. Stewart, and His Adventure: In Capturing and Exposing the Great "Western Land Pirate" And His Gang, in Connexion With the Evidence; Also of the Trials, Confessions, and Execution of a Number of Murrell's Associates in the State of Mississippi During the Summer of 1835, and the Execu The public have long been expecting the final history of Virgil A. Stewart's perilous and romantic adventure in capturing "John A. Murrell," the great "Western Land Pirate." We now propose giving a full and perfect account of that strange performance, in connexion with the evidence sustaining each important fact as it is related. We make no pretensions to author-craft, or skill in working up materials so as to heighten interest; nor is it necessary. The deep interest that every Southerner and every honest man must feel in the subject matter of this history, is sufficient to invest a plain and simple statement of facts with attraction. Our only care has been to adhere strictly to the truth, and to exhibit the details in a clear and intelligible narrative. We have commenced with a brief account of Mr. Stewart's early life to the time when he undertook the capture of Murrell and his party. We then continue with his adventure on that expedition, and conclude with a full history of the insurrectionary movements among the negroes in the southern country during the summer of 1835. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Author: Dr. Fatima Kahkashan
Publisher: JEC PUBLICATION
ISBN: 9361751719
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
Eudora Welty explores the significant role in portraying the complexities of the American South. As a leading 20th-century Southern writer, Welty masterfully intertwines historical context with personal experiences, offering deep insights into Southern culture, traditions, and social dynamics. Through novels like The Optimist's Daughter and Delta Wedding, she captures themes such as the importance of place, time, community, and myths. This book highlights Welty's enduring influence on literature and provides a valuable resource for understanding the cultural fabric of the South.
Author: John McLeod Keating
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Memphis (Tenn.)
Languages : en
Pages : 716
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Book Description
