In the late 1860s the U.S. federal government initiated the most abrupt transition from slavery to citizenship in the Americas. The transformation, of course, d

Tracing the erosion of white elite paternalism in Jim Crow Virginia, Douglas Smith reveals a surprising fluidity in southern racial politics in the decades betw

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2004) In 1821, New York’s political leaders met for over two months to rewrite the state’s constitution. The new docume

Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segre

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of Southern Italians and Sicilians immigrated to the American Gulf South. Arriving durin