An unprecedented account of one of the bloodiest and most significant racial clashes in American history

In May 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, Memphis erupted in a three-day spasm of racial violence that saw whites rampage through the city's black neighborhoods. By the time the fires consuming black churches and schools were put out, forty-six freed people had been murdered. Congress, furious at this and other evidence of white resistance in the conquered South, launched what is now called Radical Reconstruction, policies to ensure the freedom of the region's four million blacks--and one of the most remarkable experiments in American history.
Stephen V. Ash's "A Massacre in Memphis" is a portrait of a Southern city that opens an entirely new view into the Civil War and its aftermath. A momentous national event, the riot is also remarkable for being "one of the best-documented episodes of the American nineteenth century." Yet Ash is the first to mine the sources available to full effect. Bringing postwar Memphis to vivid life, he shows us newly arrived Yankees, former Rebels, boisterous Irish immigrants, and striving freed people, and how Americans of the period worked, prayed, expressed their politics, imagined the future, and how they died. Ash's harrowing and profoundly moving present-tense narration of the riot has the immediacy of the best journalism.
Told with nuance, grace, and a quiet moral passion, "A Massacre in Memphis" is Civil War-era history like no other.

The history of Tennessee is full of dramatic episodes and colorful characters that give the Volunteer State a major place in the American saga. From the bloody battle of Shiloh in 1862 to the Dayton "monkey trial" of 1925 to the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis in 1968, Tennessee has been the locale for many of America's most important events.
This new book presents a synthesis of Tennessee history from earliest times to the present. Striking a balance of social, economic, and political perspectives, it moves from frontier times to early statehood, antebellum society through the Civil War to Reconstruction, then establishes Tennessee's place in the New South and in modern times. Full coverage is devoted to the Civil Rights era and to events in the later years of this century, including environmental issues. The text deals honestly with slavery and segregation and also corrects shortcomings of previous works by placing the state's history in the context of national issues and events within the South.
The authors introduce readers to famous personages like Andrew Jackson and Austin Peay, often using quotations to give them voice. They also tell stories of ordinary people and their lives to show how they are an integral part of history. Sidebars throughout the text highlight stories of particular interest, and reading lists at the end of chapters further enhance the text's utility.
Tennesseans and Their History was written for students needing a basic introduction to state history and to general readers looking for a lively introduction to Tennessee's past. Written to be entertaining as well as instructive, it makes the state's
history relevant to a new generation of Tennesseans.
The Authors: Paul H. Bergerson is professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the editor of The Papers of Andrew Johnson.
Stephen V. Ash is associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee and author of Middle Tennessee Transformed, 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South.
Jeanette Keith is associate professor of history at Bloomsburg University and the author of Country People in the New South: Tennessee's Upper Cumberland.

Originally published in 1988, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed marks a significant advance in the social history of the American Civil War--an approach exemplified and extended in Ash's later work and that of other leading Civil War scholars. Winner of the Tennessee History Book Award and named by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book, it examines the Civil War in Middle Tennessee in light of conflict between African Americans and whites, the decline of institutions (churches, schools, courts), and economic disruption. Ash provides a rich description of how a prosperous section of Tennessee descended into devastating internal warfare that in some respects continued for years after the war. For the new edition, Ash has written a preface that takes into account the advance of Civil War historiography since the book's original appearance. This preface cites subsequent studies focusing not only on race and class but also on women and gender relations, the significance of partisan politics in shaping the course of secession in Tennessee and other upper-South states, the economic forces at work, the influence of republican ideology, and the investigation of the degree to which slaves were active agents in their own emancipation.

Paul H. Bergeron joined the University of Tennessee History Department in 1972 and retired three decades later, widely recognized as one of our country's premier scholars of nineteenth-century political history. In addition to his meticulous scholarship--his career included editorship of both the Correspondence of James K. Polk and the Papers of Andrew Johnson--Bergeron was an esteemed teacher and mentor, celebrated by students and colleagues alike for his wisdom, graciousness, and humor. While at UT, Bergeron directed eleven master's theses and twelve PhD dissertations, not to mention advising three non-thesis master's students and serving as a committee member for five other master's theses and twenty-two other PhD dissertations--a record unrivaled in the annals of the department. A testament to Bergeron's enduring impact as a mentor, Nineteenth-Century America gathers original historical essays by seven scholars, all formerly doctoral students under Bergeron's direction. The essays, though topically broad in scope, all adhere to Bergeron's rigorous and time-honored standards for research--traditions that have faced intellectual challenges over the years but have never gone out of fashion. Subjects addressed include the Sabbath controversy in the upper South; the intriguing story of how a Union army map maker's illustrated diary/memoir was found, acquired, and published; and Andrew Johnson's role in the pardoning of defeated former Rebels after the Civil War. Despite the variety of the collection, many of the essays deal in some way with politics, political institutions, or public life--all key concerns of Bergeron's scholarship.Bergeron himself provides the book's afterword, reflecting on his long career of study and leadership in the field of antebellum political history--a field, as Bergeron himself admits, that is receiving less and less attention among modern historians. There is reason here to rejoice, however, as Nineteenth-Century America shows the period to be of continuing interest, and Bergeron's influence, enduring.

This book offers a Gramscian sociological analysis of the electoral rise and 'fall' of the British National Party (BNP) in the Outer-East London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Through a critical evaluation of the political-scientific theories that have so far dominated attempts to explain the electoral performance of far right parties, this book will assess the significance of the relationship between political parties and wider civil society. With reference to no fewer than 162 ethnographic conversations, 31 in-depth interviews with local voters and 18 months of political ethnographic observation, Rise and fall of the British National Party: A sociological perspective stresses the importance of how voters negotiate the objective structural, cultural and political conditions in which they find themselves. With up-to-date, relevant discussions of the politicisation of issues such as 'race' and 'nation', as well as the political terrain after the 2010 and 2015 general elections, the book demonstrates how class identification is a powerful feature of BNP supporters' disassociation with mainstream party politics. Offering an analysis of the BNP's rise and 'fall' at both the local and the national level, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the areas of British politics, party politics, and fascism and the far right.