The lost education of Horace Tate

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Sally E. Hadden

"Obscured from our view of slaves and masters in America is a critical third party: the state, with its coercive power. This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, the nature, and the extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes of governing slaves throughout the South.". "Mining a variety of sources, Sally Hadden presents the views of both patrollers and slaves as she depicts the patrols, composed of "respectable" members of society as well as poor whites, often mounted and armed with whips and guns, exerting a brutal and archaic brand of racial control inextricably linked to post-Civil War vigilantism and the Ku Klux Klan. City councils also used patrollers before the war, and police forces afterward, to impose their version of race relations across the South, making the entire region, not just plantations, an armed camp where slave workers were controlled through terror and brutality."--BOOK JACKET.

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Carol Flake

New Orleans, home of the great American blowout bash - Mardi Gras - is the exotic city on the Bayou that thumbs its nose at the conservative spirit of the rest of the South. And Mardi Gras, that wild, uninhibited, frenzied festival of multiculturalism, music, sex, and the outer limits of debauchery, is the city's annual and legendary celebration of itself. But what really lies behind the masks and myths of a "pagan" festival older than baseball but less purely American than any other celebration? Despite all the glamour and popularity of Mardi Gras, few people know the real New Orleans - a city that is still socially stratified, racially divided, constrained by secrets. A city whose shocking double life was tragically exposed when national headlines publicized a proposal to desegregate the krewes, the quasi-cabalistic organizations that control the carnival and much of the town. Carol Flake returned to New Orleans, after more than a decade away, to chronicle a season of Carnival, to write about the paradox of an enduring rite in a crumbling city. Following the participants as they prepared for the parades and balls that make up the gala season, she found herself on a journey into a unique form of culture where ordinary standards of taste and behavior simply don't apply. She moved from subculture to subculture, from white uptown parlors and high society enclaves to French Quarter retreats, black jazz bars, and gay drag shows. She joined an all-women krewe for a float ride down Canal Street and dressed as a dancing girl in the satirical parade of the Krewe de Vieux. She visited the secret dens of elite traditional clubs and attended the open meetings of an embattled city council . Carnival, for all its rituals and disguises, mirrors New Orleans society, with its peculiar social hierarchies, its pockets of strange tradition, its madcap diversity, its partiality to drama and spectacle. The controversy surrounding Carnival is a war over the heart and soul of the city, over the dwindling base of power and money. New Orleans has succumbed to the same troubles that are tearing apart other American cities. In revealing the political, social, and cultural realities behind the grand illusions, Carol Flake has also discovered the common threads that just might bring the city back together. An intimate, surprising, sometimes shocking portrait of a great American city and a timely look at a unique part of the New South, New Orleans is destined to become a classic.

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R.W. Johnson

In 1977, RW Johnson's best-selling How Long Will South Africa Survive? provided a controversial and highly original analysis of the survival prospects of the apartheid regime. Now, after more than twenty years of ANC rule, he believes the situation has become so critical that the question must be posed again. He moves from an analysis of Jacob Zuma's rule to the increasingly dire state of the South African economy, concluding that the country is heading towards a likely International Monetary Fund bail-out which will in turn lead to a regime change of some kind.

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Colin Legum

"This study consists of two chapters which appear in the current volume of the Africa Contemporary Record (1974-5). The first is an essay which attempts to recontruct the history of the secret diplomacy that produced the historic Lusaka Declaration of December 1974. ... The second part consists of an analysis of economic, political and social developments in the Republic of South Africa during the period covered by the previous essay."