Author: Augustus Q. Walton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781940127026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 94
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Book Description
Virgil A. Stewart happened to be in the right place at the right time. In January 1834, he offered to help a friend in Madison County, Tennessee track down two missing slaves who were believed to have been stolen by a local thief named John A. Murrell. Posing as a man looking for a lost horse, Stewart won Murrell's confidence over the course of several days and the thief shared with him stories of his exploits and revealed various criminal acts he had committed, including robbery, slave stealing, and murder. Murrell also admitted to being the leader of a vast criminal empire with one thousand members-some of whom were well-respected men in their communities-known as the Mystic Clan of the Confederacy. He wanted to convince slaves across the South to rise up against their masters on Christmas night in 1835, during which time Murrell and his clan would rob on a grand scale. History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murrel, the Great Western Land Pirate...To Which is Added a Biographical Sketch of Mr. Virgil A. Stewart was first published in 1835, and is the primary source for the life, crimes, and legend of John A. Murrell, a man Stewart labeled "the great Western Land Pirate." Stewart transformed a petty thief from Denmark, Tennessee into a criminal mastermind with a network of like-minded rogues that stretched across the Old Southwest.
Author: James Robert Soda Pitts
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617034152
Category : Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Author: Michael Woodiwiss
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802082787
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
Historisch overzicht van de samenhang en wederzijdse beïnvloeding van de georganiseerde misdaad en de politiek in de Verenigde Staten.
Author: David S. Reynolds
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199976406
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 656
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Book Description
The award-winning Beneath the American Renaissance is a classic work on American literature. It immeasurably broadens our knowledge of our most important literary period, as first identified by F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. With its combination of sharp critical insight, engaging observation, and narrative drive, it represents the kind of masterful cultural history for which David Reynolds is known. Here the major works of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson receive striking, original readings set against the rich backdrop of contemporary popular writing. Now back in print, the volume includes a new foreword by historian Sean Wilentz that reveals the book's impact and influence. A magisterial work of criticism and cultural history, Beneath the American Renaissance will fascinate anyone interested in the genesis of America's most significant literary epoch and the iconic figures who defined it.
Author: Jebe B. Fisher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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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: James L. Penick
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
John A. Murrell lived in Tennessee when Andrew Jackson was president. According to legend, he was an able man who had been raised to be a rascal by his unscrupulous mother. Flogged and imprisoned as a youth, he swore eternal vengeance against the society that had punished him. He became a highwayman and merciless killer, a horse thief, counterfeiter, and slave stealer. He often disguised himself as a clergyman and preached to congregations while confederates stole their horses. He scattered counterfeit money like confetti. This research was undertaken in a skeptical spirit akin to that of Marshall many years ago. This book is about the legend and about what really happened, but only in a secondary sense is its purpose to set the record straight. How was an indifferent thief transformed into a master criminal?
Author: John Caldwell Guilds
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820318875
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
William Gilmore Simms (1807-1870), the antebellum South's foremost author and cultural critic, was the first advocate of regionalism in the creation of national literature. This collection of essays emphasizes his portrayal of America's westward migration.
Author: James Phelan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Tennessee
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
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.
