JERE NASH WITH CHARLES REAGAN WILSON: RECONSTRUCTION IN MISSISSIPPI, 1862-1877

Join us as we welcome JERE NASH  in conversation with CHARLES REAGAN WILSON on MONDAY, DECEMBER 1 at 6:00 PM to celebrate the release of Nash's new book RECONSTRUCTION IN MISSISSIPPI, 1862-1877.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Throughout the ten-year period following the end of the Civil War, Mississippians responded to broader movements in the country, to changes in the national and international economy, and to congressional and presidential initiatives as they worked to recover from the devastation of war and pursue new expressions of freedom. Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1862-1877 is a compelling account of how Black Mississippians embraced this freedom and how white Mississippians could not.

Recording the mechanics of how the Confederate states were allowed to resume representation in Congress, the restoration of civil governments, and the political freedoms the formerly enslaved people acquired, Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1862-1877 documents the ways economic freedoms, such as the acquisition of land and the negotiation of fair labor contracts, evolved. Jere Nash begins this exploration with how the formerly enslaved men and women changed the political landscape for Abraham Lincoln by taking matters into their own hands as the Union Army moved into Mississippi in 1862. Nash then traces the federal occupation of the state, the adoption of the infamous Black Codes by the state legislature in 1865, the drafting and approval of the new constitution in 1869, the selection of the first two Black men ever to serve in the United States Senate, and the use of terror and fraud by white Democrats to steal the election of 1875 and regain political power. Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1862-1877 is a detailed and comprehensive history of this turbulent and eventful era in Mississippi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jere Nash is a native of Greenville, Mississippi, served as a political consultant for forty-five years, and is coauthor of three books of Mississippi history. His first book, Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2006, written with Andy Taggart, won awards from the Mississippi Historical Society and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
 

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER:

Charles Reagan Wilson’s family grew up in the west Texas town of El Paso, but his family roots are in little towns north of Nashville, Tennessee. He earned degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso, and his doctorate is from the University of Texas at Austin. Wilson came to the University of Mississippi in 1981 to work with co-editor William Ferris and 700 contributors on the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989) and taught in Oxford for thirty-three years before retiring in 2014. He had the good sense to marry a Mississippi woman, Marie Antoon, who is his partner in life’s adventures, including working on his book, The Southern Way Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South (2023). Wilson also coedited, with Ted Ownby, the Mississippi Encyclopedia, authored three other history books, edited eleven volumes of essays, directed twelve symposia and conferences on the South, directed 24 PhD dissertations, and served on nearly a hundred master of arts committees. He was director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture from 1998 to 2007.