From lesser-known state figures to the ancestors of Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, and James Meredith, Mississippi Zion: The Struggle for Liberation in Attala County, 1865-1915 brings the voices and experiences of everyday people to the forefront and reveals a history dictated by people rather than eras. Author Evan Howard Ashford, a native of the county, examines how African Americans in Attala County, after the Civil War, shaped economic, social, and political politics as a nonmajority racial group. At the same time, Ashford provides a broader view of Black life occurring throughout the state during the same period. By examining southern African American life mainly through Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, historians have long mischaracterized African Americans in Mississippi by linking their empowerment and progression solely to periods of federal assistance. This book shatters that model and reframes the postslavery era as a Liberation Era to examine how African Americans pursued land, labor, education, politics, community building, and progressive race relations to position themselves as societal equals. Ashford salvages Attala County from this historical misconception to give Mississippi a new history. He examines African Americans as autonomous citizens whose liberation agenda paralleled and intersected the vicious redemption agenda, and he shows the struggle between Black and white citizens for societal control. Mississippi Zion provides a fresh examination into the impact of Black politics on creating the anti-Black apparatuses that grounded the state's infamous Jim Crow society. The use of photographs provides an accurate aesthetic of rural African Americans and their connection to the historical moment. This in-depth perspective captures the spectrum of African American experiences that contradict and nuance how historians write, analyze, and interpret southern African American life in the postslavery era.

As American Indian communities face the new century, they look to the future armed with confidence in the indigenous perspectives that have kept them together thus far. Now five premier scholars in American Indian history, along with a tribal leader who has placed an indelible mark on the history of her people, show how understanding the past is the key to solving problems facing Indians today.Edited by Albert L. Hurtado and introduced by Wilma Mankiller, this book includes the insights of Colin G. Calloway, R. David Edmunds, Laurence M. Hauptman, Peter Iverson, and Brenda J. Child - scholars who have helped shape the way an entire generation thinks about American Indian history. Writing broadly about twentieth-century Native history, they focus on themes that drive this field of study: Indian identity, tribal acknowledgment, sovereignty, oral tradition, and cultural adaptation. Drawn from the Wilma Mankiller Symposium on American History, these thoughtful essays show how history continues to influence contemporary Native life. The authors carve a broad geographic swath - from the Oneidas' interpretation of the past, to the perseverance of the jingle dress tradition among the Ojibwes, to community persistence in the Southwest. Wilma Mankiller's essay on contemporary tribal government adds a personal perspective to understanding the situation of Indian people today.

This innovative book examines how African Americans in the South made sense of the devastating loss of life unleashed by the Civil War and emancipation. During and after the war, African Americans died in vast numbers from battle, disease, and racial violence. While freedom was a momentous event for the formerly enslaved, it was also deadly. Through an investigation into how African Americans reacted to and coped with the passing away of loved ones and community members, Ashley Towle argues that freedpeople gave credence to their free status through their experiences with mortality. African Americans harnessed the power of death in a variety of arenas, including within the walls of national and private civilian cemeteries, in applications for widows' pensions, in the pulpits of black churches, around seance tables, on the witness stand at congressional hearings, and in the columns of African American newspapers. In the process of mourning the demise of kith and kin, black people reconstituted their families, forged communal bonds, and staked claims to citizenship, civil rights, and racial justice from the federal government. In a society upended by civil war and emancipation, death was political.