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"Throughout their essays, these emerging scholars contribute significantly to legal, military, cultural, and women's history, while demonstrating that race and ethnicity are woven into all aspects of the South's past."--BOOK JACKET.
Three Jews, Alfred Dreyfus, Mendel Beilis, and Leo Frank, were charged with heinous crimes in the generation before World War I, Dreyfus of treason in France, Beilis of ritual murder in Russia, and Frank of the murder of a young girl in the United States. Quite aside from the lurid details and sensational charges, larger issues emerged, among them the power of modern anti-Semitism, the sometimes tragic conflict between the freedom of the press and the protection of individual rights, the unpredictable reactions of individuals when subjected to extreme situations, and the inevitable ambiguities of campaigns for truth and justice when political advantage is to be gained from them. In attempting to untangle myth and reality many surprises emerge; heroes appear less heroic and villains less villainous, while real factors appear more important than most accounts of the affairs have recognised.
Lynching has often been called "America's national crime" that has defined the tradition of extralegal violence in America. Having claimed many thousand victims, "Judge Lynch" holds a firm place in the dark recesses of our national memory. In Popular Justice, Manfred Berg explores the history of lynching from the colonial era to the present. American lynch law, he argues, has rested on three pillars: the frontier experience, racism, and the anti-authoritarian spirit of grassroots democracy. Berg looks beyond the familiar story of mob violence against African American victims, who comprised the majority of lynch targets, to include violence targeting other victim groups, such as Mexicans and the Chinese, as well as many of those cases in which race did not play a role. As he nears the modern era, he focuses on the societal changes that ended lynching as a public spectacle. Berg's narrative concludes with an examination of lynching's legacy in American culture. From the colonial era and the American Revolution up to the twenty-first century, lynching has been a part of our nation's history. Manfred Berg provides us with the first comprehensive overview of "popular justice."
Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it.
An analysis of the Leo Frank case as a measure of the complexities characterizing the relationship between African Americans and Jews in America In 1915 Leo Frank, a Northern Jew, was lynched in Georgia. He had been convicted of the murder of Mary Phagan, a young white woman who worked in the Atlanta pencil factory managed by Frank. In a tumultuous trial in 1913 Frank's main accuser was Jim Conley, an African American employee in the factory. Was Frank guilty? In our time a martyr's aura falls over Frank as a victim of religious and regional bigotry. The unending controversy has inspired debates, movies, books, songs, and theatrical productions. Among the creative works focused on the case a...
The Leo Frank case of 1913 was one of the most sensational trials of the early twentieth century, capturing international attention. Frank, a northern Jewish factory supervisor in Atlanta, was convicted for the murder of Mary Phagan, a young laborer native to the South, largely on the perjured testimony of an African American janitor. The trial was both a murder mystery and a courtroom drama marked by lurid sexual speculation and overt racism. The subsequent lynching of Frank in 1915 by an angry mob only made the story more irresistible to historians, playwrights, novelists, musicians, and filmmakers for decades to come. Matthew H. Bernstein is the first scholar to examine the feature films ...
Mike Dash is a master of atmospheric and entertaining historical narrative. In Satan's Circus he vividly opens up the world of twentieth-century New York, telling the gripping story of police officer Charley Becker's rise and fall and of the sensational murder trials that led to his gruesome death in the electric chair. With a cast of colourful characters, from Big Tim Sullivan, the election-rigging vice lord, to future President Theodore Roosevelt and beloved gangster Jack Zelig, Satan's Circus brings to life an almost forgotten Gotham - a raucous, gaudy and utterly corrupt city.
Was an innocent man wrongly accused of murder? On April 26, 1913, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan planned to meet friends at a parade in Atlanta, Georgia. But first she stopped at the pencil factory where she worked to pick up her paycheck. Mary never left the building alive. A black watchman found Mary’s body brutally beaten and raped. Police arrested the watchman, but they weren’t satisfied that he was the killer. Then they paid a visit to Leo Frank, the factory’s superintendent, who was both a northerner and a Jew. Spurred on by the media frenzy and prejudices of the time, the detectives made Frank their prime suspect, one whose conviction would soothe the city’s anger over the deat...
Cedric J. Robinson offers a new understanding of race in America through his analysis of theater and film of the early twentieth century. He argues that economic, political, and cultural forces present in the eras of silent film and the early "talkies" firmly entrenched limited representations of African Americans. Robinson grounds his study in contexts that illuminate the parallel growth of racial beliefs and capitalism, beginning with Shakespearean England and the development of international trade. He demonstrates how the needs of American commerce determined the construction of successive racial regimes that were publicized in the theater and in motion pictures, particularly through plan...
Winner, T. R. Fehrenbach Award, Texas Historical Commission, 2007 From the nineteenth century until today, the power brokers of Dallas have always portrayed their city as a progressive, pro-business, racially harmonious community that has avoided the racial, ethnic, and class strife that roiled other Southern cities. But does this image of Dallas match the historical reality? In this book, Michael Phillips delves deeply into Dallas's racial and religious past and uncovers a complicated history of resistance, collaboration, and assimilation between the city's African American, Mexican American, and Jewish communities and its white power elite. Exploring more than 150 years of Dallas history, ...