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The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case - Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era (Paperback)
Loot Price: R497
Discovery Miles 4 970
You Save: R89
(15%)
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The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case - Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era (Paperback)
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List price R586
Loot Price R497
Discovery Miles 4 970
You Save R89 (15%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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In June 1870, the residents of the city of New Orleans were already
on edge when two African American women kidnapped
seventeen-month-old Mollie Digby from in front of her New Orleans
home. It was the height of Radical Reconstruction, and the old
racial order had been turned upside down: black men now voted, held
office, sat on juries, and served as policemen. Nervous white
residents, certain that the end of slavery and resulting
"Africanization" of the city would bring chaos, pointed to the
Digby abduction as proof that no white child was safe. Louisiana's
twenty-eight-year old Reconstruction governor, Henry Clay Warmoth,
hoping to use the investigation of the kidnapping to validate his
newly integrated police force to the highly suspicious white
population of New Orleans, saw to it that the city's best
Afro-Creole detective, John Baptiste Jourdain, was put on the case,
and offered a huge reward for the return of Mollie Digby and the
capture of her kidnappers. When the Associated Press sent the story
out on the wire, newspaper readers around the country began to
follow the New Orleans mystery. Eventually, police and prosecutors
put two strikingly beautiful Afro-Creole women on trial for the
crime, and interest in the case exploded as a tense courtroom drama
unfolded. In The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case, Michael Ross
offers the first full account of this event that electrified the
South at one of the most critical moments in the history of
American race relations. Tracing the crime from the moment it was
committed through the highly publicized investigation and
sensationalized trial that followed, all the while chronicling the
public outcry and escalating hysteria as news and rumors
surrounding the crime spread, Ross paints a vivid picture of the
Reconstruction-era South and the complexities and possibilities
that faced the newly integrated society. Leading readers into
smoke-filled concert saloons, Garden District drawing rooms,
sweltering courthouses, and squalid prisons, Ross brings this
fascinating era back to life. A stunning work of historical
recreation, The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is sure to
captivate anyone interested in true crime, the Civil War and its
aftermath, and the history of New Orleans and the American South.
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