By the time the army intervened later that afternoon, at least forty-eight men - an overwhelming majority of them black - were dead and more than two hundred had been wounded. In An Absolute Massacre, James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., examines the events surrounding the confrontation and shows that no other riot in American history had a more profound or lasting effect on the country's political and social fabric.".

In the summer of 1866, racial tensions ran high in Louisiana as a constitutional convention considered disenfranchising former Confederates and enfranchising blacks. On July 30, a procession of black suffrage supporters pushed through an angry throng of hostile whites. Words were exchanged, shots rang out, and within minutes a riot erupted with unrestrained fury. When it was over, at least forty-eight men—an overwhelming majority of them black—lay dead and more than two hundred had been wounded. In An Absolute Massacre, James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., examines the events surrounding the confrontation and offers a compelling look at the racial tinderbox that was the post-Civil War South.

Examines the social, political, and economic forces that interacted to produce the most notable of the South's Reconstruction riots.

On 13 April 1919, a fateful event took place which was to define the last decades of the British Raj in India. At 5:10pm on that day, Brigadier-General 'Rex' Dyer led a small party of soldiers through the centre of Amritsar into a walled garden known as the Jallianwala Bagh. He had been informed that an illegal political meeting was taking place and had come to disperse it. On entering the garden, Dyer's men immediately lined up in formation. Dyer then gave the order to open fire on the huge crowd that had gathered there. 379 people were killed and at least 1,000 more were wounded in what has became known as the Amritsar Massacre. Nick Lloyd here provides a highly readable, but detailed account of the most infamous British atrocity in the entire history of the Raj. He considers the massacre in its historical context, but also describes its impact in uniting the people of the sub-continent against their colonial rulers. The book dispels common myths and misconceptions surrounding the massacre and offers a new explanation of the decisions taken in 1919. Ultimately, it seeks to examine whether the massacre was an unfortunate and tragic mistake or a case of cold-blooded murder, and one which would fatally weaken the British position in India.

The untold story of the massacre of a Southern town’s freedmen and a white lawyer’s battle to bring the killers to justice: “Riveting.” —The New York Times Book Review Following the Civil War, Colfax, Louisiana, was a town, like many, where African Americans and whites mingled uneasily. But on April 13, 1873, a small army of white ex–Confederate soldiers, enraged after attempts by freedmen to assert their new rights, killed more than sixty African Americans who had occupied a courthouse. With skill and tenacity, the Washington Post’s Charles Lane transforms this nearly forgotten incident into a riveting historical saga. Seeking justice for the slain, one brave US attorney, James Beckwith, risked his life and career to investigate and punish the perpetrators—but they all went free. What followed was a series of courtroom dramas that culminated at the Supreme Court, where the justices’ verdict compromised the victories of the Civil War and left Southern blacks at the mercy of violent whites for generations. The Day Freedom Died is an electrifying piece of historical detective work that captures a gallery of characters from presidents to townspeople, and re-creates the bloody days of Reconstruction, when the often-brutal struggle for equality moved from the battlefield into communities across the nation. “Thoroughly readable, carefully documented.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Fascinating.” —New Orleans Times-Picayune “An electrifying piece of historical reporting.” —Tucson Citizen

In the early morning of November 29, 1864, with the fate of the Union still uncertain, part of the First Colorado and nearly all of the Third Colorado volunteer regiments, commanded by Colonel John Chivington, surprised hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped on the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. More than 150 Native Americans were slaughtered, the vast majority of them women, children, and the elderly, making it one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. A Misplaced Massacre examines the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. This site opened after a long and remarkably contentious planning process. Native Americans, Colorado ranchers, scholars, Park Service employees, and politicians alternately argued and allied with one another around the question of whether the nation’s crimes, as well as its achievements, should be memorialized. Ari Kelman unearths the stories of those who lived through the atrocity, as well as those who grappled with its troubling legacy, to reveal how the intertwined histories of the conquest and colonization of the American West and the U.S. Civil War left enduring national scars. Combining painstaking research with storytelling worthy of a novel, A Misplaced Massacre probes the intersection of history and memory, laying bare the ways differing groups of Americans come to know a shared past.