Hester makes the Reconstruction Era come alive as Madison Davis and Alfred Richardson, Clark County, Georgia's, two ex-slave legislators, fight for the right to vote and hold office against incredible obstacles.

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.

Every man in this life has a part to play, and, leaves a footprint, seen and followed by--some other. How well that part is played depends very largely on the man. It may be played loosely--carelessly--without a thought of anything but the NOW, the present; without any thought of its scope in reaching, touching, or influencing another's life. It is a footprint, nevertheless, and some one follows in it and is stunted in life, perhaps for life. On the other hand that part may be played with great care as to every detail, with much toil in preparation, with the thought ever in view that "no man lives to himself alone," but that we are building character and making men, how careful, then must one be in the CHOICE and USE of the material that tends to the "making" men.

First published in 1944, this is a detailed survey of twenty-four distinguished periodicals published in antebellum Georgia. Flanders shows that literary activity was generally confined to middle Georgia and often concentrated on themes of religion and morality, early American life, and European adventures. An extensive bibliography and three appendices give a comprehensive list of magazines published during the time, including dates, places of publication, and names of editors and publishers. More than nine hundred footnotes further elaborate on the analysis of backgrounds, local historical events, and information on contributors.