African War History

In March 1865, a 30-man team of mostly Black Union soldiers traveled from Jacksonville, Florida 100 miles behind enemy lines to conduct a ridiculously daring raid in remote Marion County. Then they had to return on foot to St. Augustine 80 miles from the raid site, knowing an accomplished Confederate cavalry unit would be hot on their trail. The Black raiders planned the operation, employed their own strategy, led by a Black Sergeant-Major—no White officer—and carried out the mission.

The 27th United States Colored Troops (USCT), composed largely of free black Ohio men, served in the Union army from April 1864 to September 1865 in Virginia and North Carolina. It was the first time most members of the unit had traveled so far from home. The men faced daily battles against racism and inferior treatment, training, and supplies. They suffered from the physical difficulties of military life, the horrors of warfare, and homesickness and worried about loved ones left at home without financial support.

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to 19th-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude.

With an executive order from President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, the United States Marine Corps - the last all-white branch of the U.S. military - was forced to begin recruiting and enlisting African Americans. The first black recruits received basic training at the segregated Camp Montford Point, adjacent to Camp Lejeune, near Jacksonville, North Carolina.

An epic saga of hubris, cruelty, and redemption, Now the Hell Will Start tells the remarkable tale of the greatest manhunt of World War II. Herman Perry, besieged by the hardships of the Indo-Burmese jungle and the racism meted out by his white commanding officers, found solace in opium and marijuana. But on one fateful day, Perry shot his unarmed white lieutenant in the throes of an emotional collapse and fled into the jungle. Brendan I. Koerner spent nearly five years chasing Perry's ghost to the most remote corners of India and Burma.

James Page spent the majority of his life enslaved - during which time he experienced the death of his free father, witnessed his mother and brother being sold on the auction block, and was forcibly moved 700 miles south from Richmond, Virginia, to Tallahassee, Florida, by his enslaver, John Parkhill. Page would go on to become Parkhill's chief aide on his plantation and, unusually, a religious leader who was widely respected by enslaved men and women as well as by white clergy, educators, and politicians.

From lesser-known state figures to the ancestors of Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, and James Meredith, Mississippi Zion 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 non-majority racial group. At the same time, Ashford provides a broader view of Black life occurring throughout the state during the same period.

A Plausible Man unfolds as a historical detective story, as Susanna Ashton combs obscure records for evidence of Jackson's remarkable flight from slavery to freedom, his quest to liberate his enslaved family, and his emergence as an international advocate for abolition. This fresh and original work takes us through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the restoration of white supremacy-where we last glimpse Jackson losing his freedom again on a Southern chain gang.

How did a Black child, growing up in segregationist Mississippi during the early 1900s, become the commander of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Corps during the brutal Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935? In this gripping, never-before-told tale, biographer Thomas E. Simmons brings to life Robinson’s outstanding success in becoming a pilot, his expertise in building and assembling his own working aircraft, his influence on the establishment of a school of aviation at Tuskegee Institute, and his wartime service.

On July 4, 1861, the schooner S. J. Waring set sail from New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days later it limped back into New York's harbor with the ship's black cook and steward at the helm. While the story of that ill-fated voyage is one of the most harrowing tales of captivity and survival on the high seas, it has been tragically lost to history. Now reclaiming William Tillman as the American hero he deserves to be, historian Brian McGinty takes listeners on a courageous journey.

Nothing but Freedom examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under. Taking a comparative approach, Eric Foner examines Reconstruction in the southern states against the experience of Haiti, where a violent slave revolt was followed by the establishment of an undemocratic government.

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century - but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them.

When John Brown decided to raid the federal armory in Harper's Ferry as the starting point of his intended liberation effort in the South, some closest to him thought it was unnecessary and dangerous. Frederick Douglass, a pioneering abolitionist, refused Brown's invitation to join him in Virginia, believing that the raid on the armory was a suicide mission. Yet in front of Douglass, "Emperor" Shields Green, a fugitive from South Carolina, accepted John Brown's invitation. When the raid failed, Emperor was captured with the rest of Brown's surviving men and hanged on December 16, 1859.

From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America. “In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster….” Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery—the former seat of the...

Considered one of “the most innovative studies of American emancipation in the Civil War” (David W. Blight, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Frederick Douglass), Somewhere Toward Freedom is a groundbreaking account of Sherman’s March to the Sea—the critical Civil War campaign that...

In 1851, Elizabeth Parker, a free black child in Chester County, Pennsylvania, was bound and gagged, snatched from a local farm, and hurried off to a Baltimore slave pen. Two weeks later, her teenage sister, Rachel, was abducted from another Chester County farm. Because slave catchers could take fugitive slaves and free blacks across state lines to be sold, the border country of Pennsylvania/Maryland had become a dangerous place for most black people.

America after the Civil War was a land of shattered promises and entrenched hatreds. In the explosive South, danger took many forms: white extremists loyal to a defeated world terrorized former slaves, while in the halls of government, bitter and byzantine political warfare raged between Republicans and Democrats.

At the crux of America's history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable. In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War.

The remarkable and inspiring story of William Still, an unknown abolitionist who dedicated his life to managing a critical section of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia—the free state directly north of the Mason-Dixon Line—helping hundreds of people escape from slavery. Born free in...

The story of the fascinating, fraught alliance among Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman—and how its breakup led to the success of America’s most important social movement. “Fresh, provocative and engrossing.” —New York Times In the crucial early...