Murphy’s life long love of alliterative lyrical play professed on paper created piles of fully stuffed folders steadily stacked into a significant collection of careful consideration. Here you can experience the result- a brimming bookful of ballads and broken bits brought together by trauma bonding and book binding into the emotionally moving mosaic you hold in your hands. Catch it with the confidence that you are not alone in life’s confusions and release it back into the world with your own refreshing style.

Scholars of Reconstruction have generally described Republican party factional conflicts in racial terms, as if the Radical agenda evoked unified black support. As Michael W. Fitzgerald shows in the first major study of black popular politics in the urban South in the years surrounding the Civil War, that depiction oversimplifies a contentious and often overlooked intraracial dynamic. Republican political power, he argues, heightened divisions within the African American community, divisions that were ultimately a major factor in the failure of Reconstruction. Focusing on Mobile, the Confederacy’s fourth largest city, Fitzgerald traces how the rivalry between longtime black residents and destitute freedmen fleeing the countryside yielded a startlingly antagonistic political scene. He demonstrates that the Republican factionalism that helped doom Reconstruction went beyond competing cliques of white officeholders. Boldly challenging reigning theories about the nature of post–Civil War politics, Urban Emancipation will spark historical debate for years to come.

The conduct of the central government was often reactive rather than deliberate. While its lack of a coherent policy was not remarkable, given the period under consideration, the government's failure to develop such a policy was disastrous in dealing with the fundamental issue of Catholic emancipation. The final surrender of Peel and Wellington was bitter and the 1829 Catholic relief act contained insults to Irish Catholics. The nature of the act, coupled with continued Protestant ascendancy and landlordism, and Catholic mass poverty and insecurity, meant that Catholic emancipation was not a prelude to Ireland's assimilation into the United Kingdom but instead, the beginning of the process of modern Irish nationalism.

"Paul Ortiz's lyrical and closely argued study introduces us to unknown generations of freedom fighters for whom organizing democratically became in every sense a way of life. Ortiz changes the very ways we think of Southern history as he shows in marvelous detail how Black Floridians came together to defend themselves in the face of terror, to bury their dead, to challenge Jim Crow, to vote, and to dream."—David R. Roediger, author of Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past “Emancipation Betrayed is a remarkable piece of work, a tightly argued, meticulously researched examination of the first statewide movement by African Americans for civil rights, a movement which since has been effectively erased from our collective memory. The book poses a profound challenge to our understanding of the limits and possibilities of African American resistance in the early twentieth century. This analysis of how a politically and economically marginalized community nurtures the capacity for struggle speaks as much to our time as to 1919.”—Charles Payne, author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom

In The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.

One of the nation's foremost Lincoln scholars offers an authoritative consideration of the document that represents the most far-reaching accomplishment of our greatest president. No single official paper in American history changed the lives of as many Americans as Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. But no American document has been held up to greater suspicion. Its bland and lawyerlike language is unfavorably compared to the soaring eloquence of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural; its effectiveness in freeing the slaves has been dismissed as a legal illusion. And for some African-Americans the Proclamation raises doubts about Lincoln himself. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation dispels the myths and mistakes surrounding the Emancipation Proclamation and skillfully reconstructs how America's greatest president wrote the greatest American proclamation of freedom.

Modernism has long been seen as either a symptom of decadence or a sign of emancipation. Vivian Heller argues that Joyce's writing cannot be categorized as either decadent or emancipatory because it is predicated on the dialectical intimacy of these two terms. Heller relies on Joyce's changing use of epiphany to trace the arc of his development, focusing on the negative epiphanies of Dubliners, the relativistic epiphanies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the retrospective epiphanies of Ulysses.