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Christopher Waldrep

Born: Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: * Resided in McDonough and Coles Counties

Biography: Christopher Waldrep was a professor of history at Eastern Illinois University. Currently he is Professor of History and Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Chair in American History at San Francisco State University.


Awards:

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Email: CWALDREP@SFSU.EDU
Website: http://BSS.SFSU.EDU/WALDREP
Christopher Waldrep on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=christopher+waldrep


Selected Titles

Jury discrimination :
ISBN: 9780820340302 OCLC: 468232569

University of Georgia Press, Athens, Ga. : ©2010.

The author traces the origins of Americans' ideas about trial by jury and analyzes jury discrimination. Southerners' determination to keep their juries entirely white played a crucial role in segregation, emboldening lynchers and vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan. As the postbellum Congress articulated ideals of national citizenship in civil rights legislation, most importantly the Fourteenth Amendment, factions within the U.S. Supreme Court battled over how to read the amendment: expansively, protecting a variety of rights against a host of enemies, or narrowly, guarding only against rare violations by state governments. The latter view prevailed, entombing the amendment in a narrow interpretation that persists to this day. Although the high court clearly denounced the overt discrimination enacted by state legislatures, it set evidentiary rules that made discrimination by state officers and agents extremely difficult to prove. Had these rules been less onerous, the author argues, countless black jurors could have been seated throughout the nation at precisely the moment when white legislators and jurists were making and enforcing segregation laws. Marshall and Mollison's success in breaking through Mississippi law to get blacks admitted to juries suggests that legal reasoning plausibly founded on constitutional principle, as articulated by the Supreme Court, could trump even the most stubbornly prejudiced public opinion.

  Jury discrimination :
ISBN: 0820330027 OCLC: 753324160

University of Georgia Press, Athens, Ga : 2010.

Lynching in America :
ISBN: 9780814793985 OCLC: 168652849

New York University Press, New York : ©2006.

Night riders :
ISBN: 0822313596 OCLC: 27814153

Duke University Press, Durham : 1993.

In the late nineteenth century, industrialization was making its way into rural America. In an agricultural region of Kentucky and Tennessee called the Black Patch for the dark tobacco grown there, big business arrived with a vengeance, eliminating competition, manipulating prices, and undermining local control. The farmers fought back. Night Riders tells the story of the struggle that followed, and reveals the ambiguities and complexities of a drama that convulsed this community for over two decades.Christopher Waldrep shows that, contrary to many accounts, these wealthy tobacco planters did not resist these new forces simply because of a nostalgia for a bygone time. Instead, many sought to become modern capitalists themselves--but on their own terms. The South's rural elite found their ability to hire and control black labor--the established racial practice of the community--threatened by the low prices offered by big companies for their raw materials. In response, farmers organized and demanded better prices for their tobacco. The tobacco companies then attempted to divide the farmers by offering higher prices to those willing to break with the others. When some cultivators succumbed, their betrayal awakened a deeply rooted vigilante tradition that called for the protection of community at all costs. Waldrep analyzes the spasm of violence that ensued in which horsemen, riding at night, destroyed tobacco barns and the warehouses where the companies stored their tobacco. But despite this fierce upheaval, the Black Patch community endured.The most thorough treatment ever given to the Black Patch war, Night Riders illuminates a moment in history in which the traditional and the modern, the rural and the industrial, fought for the future--and past--of a community.

Roots of disorder :
ISBN: 0252024257 OCLC: 38311983

University of Illinois Press, Urbana : ©1998.

The many faces of Judge Lynch :
ISBN: 1403967113 OCLC: 58830369

Palgrave Macmillan, New York : 2004.

Vicksburg's long shadow :
ISBN: 0742548686 OCLC: 57693357

Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD : 2005.

During the hottest days of the summer of 1863, while the nation's attention was focused on the small town of Gettysburg, another momentous battle was being fought along the banks of the Mississippi. In the longest single campaign of the war, the siege of Vicksburg left 19,000 dead and wounded on both sides, gave the Union Army control of the Mississippi, and left the Confederacy cut in half. Christopher Waldrep takes a fresh look at how the Vicksburg campaign was fought and remembered.

 

 

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