Download or read book Atomic Testing in Mississippi written by David Allen Burke and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-11-05 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Atomic Testing in Mississippi, David Allen Burke illuminates the nearly forgotten history of America's only nuclear detonations east of the Mississippi River. The atomic tests, conducted in the mid-1960s nearly 3,000 feet below ground in Mississippi's Tatum Salt Dome, posed a potential risk for those living within 150 miles of the site, which included residents of Hattiesburg, Jackson, Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, and New Orleans. While the detonations provided the United States with verification methods that helped limit the world's nuclear arsenals, they sparked widespread public concern. In 1964 and 1966 the Atomic Energy Commission conducted experiments at the salt dome -- code-named Dribble -- surrounded by a greater population density than any other test site in the United States. Although the detonations were not weapons tests, they fostered a conflict between regional politicians interested in government-funded science projects and a population leery of nuclear testing near their homes. Even today, residents near the salt dome are still fearful of long-term negative health consequences. Despite its controversy, Project Dribble provided the technology needed to detect and assess the performance of distant underground atomic explosions and thus verify international weapons treaty compliance. This technology led to advanced seismological systems that now provide tsunami warnings and detect atomic activity in other nuclear nations, such as Pakistan and North Korea.
Download or read book Southern Devices written by David Allen Burke and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Girls of Atomic City written by Denise Kiernan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the contributions of the thousands of women who worked at a secret uranium-enriching facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II.
Download or read book Race and Education in New Orleans written by Walter Stern and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying the two centuries that preceded Jim Crow’s demise, Race and Education in New Orleans traces the course of the city’s education system from the colonial period to the start of school desegregation in 1960. This timely historical analysis reveals that public schools in New Orleans both suffered from and maintained the racial stratification that characterized urban areas for much of the twentieth century. Walter C. Stern begins his account with the mid-eighteenth-century kidnapping and enslavement of Marie Justine Sirnir, who eventually secured her freedom and played a major role in the development of free black education in the Crescent City. As Sirnir’s story and legacy illustrate, schools such as the one she envisioned were central to the black antebellum understanding of race, citizenship, and urban development. Black communities fought tirelessly to gain better access to education, which gave rise to new strategies by white civilians and officials who worked to maintain and strengthen the racial status quo, even as they conceded to demands from the black community for expanded educational opportunities. The friction between black and white New Orleanians continued throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, when conflicts over land and resources sharply intensified. Stern argues that the post-Reconstruction reorganization of the city into distinct black and white enclaves marked a new phase in the evolution of racial disparity: segregated schools gave rise to segregated communities, which in turn created structural inequality in housing that impeded desegregation’s capacity to promote racial justice. By taking a long view of the interplay between education, race, and urban change, Stern underscores the fluidity of race as a social construct and the extent to which the Jim Crow system evolved through a dynamic though often improvisational process. A vital and accessible history, Race and Education in New Orleans provides a comprehensive look at the ways the New Orleans school system shaped the city’s racial and urban landscapes.
Download or read book Devils Walking written by Stanley Nelson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2016-10-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After midnight on December 10, 1964, in Ferriday, Louisiana, African American Frank Morris awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Outside his home and shoe shop, standing behind the shattered window, Klansmen tossed a lit match inside the store, now doused in gasoline, and instantly set the building ablaze. A shotgun pointed to Morris’s head blocked his escape from the flames. Four days later Morris died, though he managed in his last hours to describe his attackers to the FBI. Frank Morris’s death was one of several Klan murders that terrorized residents of northeast Louisiana and Mississippi, as the perpetrators continued to elude prosecution during this brutal era in American history. In Devils Walking: Klan Murders along the Mississippi in the 1960s, Pulitzer Prize finalist and journalist Stanley Nelson details his investigation—alongside renewed FBI attention—into these cold cases, as he uncovers the names of the Klan’s key members as well as systemized corruption and coordinated deception by those charged with protecting all citizens. Devils Walking recounts the little-known facts and haunting stories that came to light from Nelson’s hundreds of interviews with both witnesses and suspects. His research points to the development of a particularly virulent local faction of the Klan who used terror and violence to stop integration and end the advancement of civil rights. Secretly led by the savage and cunning factory worker Red Glover, these Klansmen—a handpicked group that included local police officers and sheriff’s deputies—discarded Klan robes for civilian clothes and formed the underground Silver Dollar Group, carrying a silver dollar as a sign of unity. Their eight known victims, mostly African American men, ranged in age from nineteen to sixty-seven and included one Klansman seeking redemption for his past actions. Following the 2007 FBI reopening of unsolved civil rights–era cases, Nelson’s articles in the Concordia Sentinel prompted the first grand jury hearing for these crimes. By unmasking those responsible for these atrocities and giving a voice to the victims’ families, Devils Walking demonstrates the importance of confronting and addressing the traumatic legacy of racism.
Download or read book Rites of August First written by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-08 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rites of August First, J.R. Kerr-Ritchie provides the first detailed analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of August First Daythe most important annual celebration of the emancipation of colonial slavery throughout the British Empire. Spanning the Western hemisphere, Kerr-Ritchie successfully unravels the cultural politics of emancipation celebrations, analyzing the social practices informed by public ritual, symbol, and spectacle designed to elicit feelings of common identity among blacks in the Atlantic world.
Download or read book Tumult And Silence At Second Creek written by Winthrop D. Jordan and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group of slaves in Adams County, Mississippi, conspired to gain their freedom by overthrowing and murdering their white masters. The conspiracy was discovered, the plotters were arrested and tried, and at least forty slaves in and around Natchez were hanged. By November the affair was over, and the planters of the district united to conceal the event behind a veil of silence. In 1971, Winthrop D. Jordan came upon the central document, previously unanalyzed by modern scholars, upon which this extraordinary book is based - a record of the testimony of some of the accused slaves as they were interrogated by a committee of planters determined to ferret out what was going on. This discovery led him on a twenty-year search for additional information about the aborted rebellion. Because no official report or even newspaper account of the plot existed, the search for evidence became a feat of historical detection. Jordan gathered information from every possible source - the private letters and diaries of members of the families involved in suppressing the conspiracy and of people who recorded the rumors that swept the Natchez area in the unsettled months following the beginning of the war; letters from Confederate soldiers concerned about the events back home; the journal of a Union officer who heard of the plot; records of the postwar Southern Claims Commission; census documents; plantation papers; even gravestones. What has emerged from this odyssey of research is a brilliantly written re-creation of one of the last slave conspiracies in the United States. It is also a revealing portrait of the Natchez region at the very beginning of the CivilWar, when Adams County was one of the wealthiest communities in the nation and a few powerful families interconnected by marriage and business controlled not only a large black population but the poorer whites as well. In piecing together the fragments of extant information about the conspiracy, Jordan has produced a vivid picture of the plantation slave community in southwestern Mississippi in 1861 - its composition and distribution; the degree of mobility permitted slaves; the ways information was passed around slave quarters and from plantation to plantation; the possibilities for communication with town slaves, free blacks, and white abolitionists. Jordan also explores the treatment of blacks by their owners, the kinds of resentments the slaves harbored, the sacrifices they were willing to make to protect or avenge abused family members, and the various ways in which they viewed freedom. Tumult and Silence at Second Creek is a major work by one of the most distinguished scholars of slavery and race relations. Winthrop D. Jordan's study of the slave society of the Natchez area at the onset of the Civil War is a landmark contribution to the field. More than that, his exhaustive and resourceful search for documentation and his careful analysis of sources make the study an extended and innovative essay on the nature of historical evidence and inference.
Download or read book Atomic Harvest written by Michael D'Antonio and published by Crown. This book was released on 1993 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspector Casey Ruud raised questions about the concerns of people like nearby farmer Tom Bailie, and eventually went public with facts and figures on faulty plant designs, poor maintenance, sloppy engineering practices, and mismanagement.
Download or read book Fort Pillow a Civil War Massacre and Public Memory written by John Cimprich and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-08 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the now-peaceful spot of Tennessee's Fort Pillow State Historic Area, a horrific incident in the nation's bloodiest war occurred on April 12, 1864. Just as a high bluff in the park offers visitors a panoramic view of the Mississippi River, John Cimprich's absorbing book affords readers a new vantage on the American Civil War as viewed through the lens of the Confederate massacre of unionist and black Federal soldiers at Fort Pillow. Cimprich covers the entire history of Fort Pillow, including its construction by Confederates, its capture and occupation by federals, the massacre, and ongoing debates surrounding that affair. He sets the scene for the carnage by describing the social conflicts in federally occupied areas between secessionists and unionists as well as between blacks and whites. In a careful reconstruction of the assault itself, Cimprich balances vivid firsthand reports with a judicious narrative and analysis of events. He shows how Major General Nathan B. Forrest attacked the garrison with a force outnumbering the Federals roughly 1,500 to 600, and a breakdown of Confederate discipline resulted. The 65 percent death toll for black unionists was approximately twice that for white unionists, and Cimprich concludes that racism was at the heart of the Fort Pillow massacre. Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory serves as a case study for several major themes of the Civil War: the great impact of military experience on campaigns, the hardships of military life, and the trend toward a more ruthless conduct of war. The first book to treat the fort's history in full, it provides a valuable perspective on the massacre and, through it, on the war and the world in which it occurred.
Download or read book Confederate Outlaw written by Brian D. McKnight and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-08 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fall of 1865, the United States Army executed Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson for his role in murdering fifty-three loyal citizens of Kentucky and Tennessee during the Civil War. Long remembered as the most unforgiving and inglorious warrior of the Confederacy, Ferguson has often been dismissed by historians as a cold-blooded killer. In Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and the Civil War in Appalachia, biographer Brian D. McKnight demonstrates how such a simple judgment ignores the complexity of this legendary character. In his analysis, McKnight maintains that Ferguson fought the war on personal terms and with an Old Testament mentality regarding the righteousness of his cause. He believed that friends were friends and enemies were enemies—no middle ground existed. As a result, he killed prewar comrades as well as longtime adversaries without regret, all the while knowing that he might one day face his own brother, who served as a Union scout. Ferguson’s continued popularity demonstrates that his bloody legend did not die on the gallows. Widespread rumors endured of his last-minute escape from justice, and over time, the borderland terrorist emerged as a folk hero for many southerners. Numerous authors resurrected and romanticized his story for popular audiences, and even Hollywood used Ferguson’s life to create the composite role played by Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales. McKnight’s study deftly separates the myths from reality and weaves a thoughtful, captivating, and accurate portrait of the Confederacy’s most celebrated guerrilla. An impeccably researched biography, Confederate Outlaw offers an abundance of insight into Ferguson’s wartime motivations, actions, and tactics, and also describes borderland loyalties, guerrilla operations, and military retribution. McKnight concludes that Ferguson, and other irregular warriors operating during the Civil War, saw the conflict as far more of a personal battle than a political one.
Download or read book Parchman Ordeal The 1965 Natchez Civil Rights Injustice written by G. Mark LaFrancis with Robert Morgan and Darrell White and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In October 1965, nearly 800 young people attempted to march from their churches in Natchez to protest segregation, discrimination and mistreatment by white leaders and elements of the Ku Klux Klan. As they exited the churches, local authorities forced the would-be marchers onto buses and charged them with "parading without a permit," a local ordinance later ruled unconstitutional. For approximately 150 of these young men and women, this was only the beginning. They were taken to the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, where prison authorities subjected them to days of abuse, humiliation and punishment under horrific conditions. Most were African Americans in their teens and early twenties. Authors G. Mark LaFrancis, Robert Morgan and Darrell White reveal the injustice of this overlooked dramatic episode in civil rights history.
Download or read book Delta Empire written by Jeannie Whayne and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South Jeannie Whayne employs the fascinating history of a powerful plantation owner in the Arkansas delta to recount the evolution of southern agriculture from the late nineteenth century through World War II. After his father’s death in 1870, Robert E. “Lee” Wilson inherited 400 acres of land in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Over his lifetime, he transformed that inheritance into a 50,000-acre lumber operation and cotton plantation. Early on, Wilson saw an opportunity in the swampy local terrain, which sold for as little as fifty cents an acre, to satisfy an expanding national market for Arkansas forest reserves. He also led the fundamental transformation of the landscape, involving the drainage of tens of thousands of acres of land, in order to create the vast agricultural empire he envisioned. A consummate manager, Wilson employed the tenancy and sharecropping system to his advantage while earning a reputation for fair treatment of laborers, a reputation—Whayne suggests—not entirely deserved. He cultivated a cadre of relatives and employees from whom he expected absolute devotion. Leveraging every asset during his life and often deeply in debt, Wilson saved his company from bankruptcy several times, leaving it to the next generation to successfully steer the business through the challenges of the 1930s and World War II. Delta Empire traces the transition from the labor-intensive sharecropping and tenancy system to the capital-intensive neo-plantations of the post–World War II era to the portfolio plantation model. Through Wilson’s story Whayne provides a compelling case study of strategic innovation and the changing economy of the South in the late nineteenth century.
Download or read book United States Nuclear Tests written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This document lists chronologically and alphabetically by name all nuclear tests and simultaneous detonations conducted by the United States from July 1945 through September 1992. Two nuclear weapons that the United States exploded over Japan ending World War II are not listed. These detonations were not "tests" in the sense that they were conducted to prove that the weapon would work as designed (as was the first test near Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945), or to advance nuclear weapon design, or to determine weapons effects, or to verify weapon safety as were the more than one thousand tests that have taken place since June 30,1946. The nuclear weapon (nicknamed "Little Boy") dropped August 6,1945 from a United States Army Air Force B-29 bomber (the Enola Gay) and detonated over Hiroshima, Japan had an energy yield equivalent to that of 15,000 tons of TNT. The nuclear weapon (virtually identical to "Fat Man") exploded in a similar fashion August 9, 1945 over Nagaski, Japan had a yield of 21,000 tons of TNT. Both detonations were intended to end World War II as quickly as possible. Data on United States tests were obtained from, and verified by, the U.S. Department of Energy's three weapons laboratories -- Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California; and Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico; and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Additionally, data were obtained from public announcements issued by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and its successors, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, and the U.S. Department of Energy, respectively.
Download or read book How the South Joined the Gambling Nation written by Michael Nelson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-09 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A national map of legalized gambling from 1963 would show one state, Nevada, with casino gambling and no states with lotteries. Today's map shows eleven commercial casino states, most of them along the Mississippi River, forty-two states with state-owned lotteries, and racetrack betting, slot-machine parlors, charitable bingo, and Native American gambling halls flourishing throughout the nation. For the past twenty years, the South has wrestled with gambling issues. In How the South Joined the Gambling Nation, Michael Nelson and John Lyman Mason examine how modern southern state governments have decided whether to adopt or prohibit casinos and lotteries. Nelson and Mason point out that although the South participated fully in past gambling eras, it is the last region to join the modern movement embracing legalized gambling. Despite the prevalence of wistful, romantic images of gambling on southern riverboats, the politically and religiously conservative ideology of the modern South makes it difficult for states to toss their chips into the pot. The authors tell the story of the arrival or rejection of legalized gambling in seven southern states -- Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, and Alabama. The authors suggest that some states chose to legalize gambling based on the examples of other nearby states, as when Mississippi casinos spurred casino legalization in Louisiana and the Georgia lottery inspired lottery campaigns in neighboring South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee. Also important was the influence of Democratic policy entrepreneurs, such as Zell Miller in Georgia, Don Siegelman in Alabama, and Edwin Edwards in Louisiana, who wanted to sell the idea of gambling in order to sell themselves to voters. At the same time, each state had its own idiosyncrasies, such as certain provisions of their state constitutions weighing heavily as a factor. Nelson and Mason show that the story of gambling's spread in the South exemplifies the process of state policy innovation. In exploring how southern states have weighed the moral and economic risk of legalizing gambling, especially the political controversies that surround these discussions, Nelson and Mason employ a suspenseful, fast-paced narrative that echoes the oftentimes hurried decisions made by state legislators. Although each of these seven states fought a unique battle over gambling, taken together, these case studies help tell the larger story of how the South -- sometimes reluctantly, sometimes enthusiastically -- decided to join the gambling nation.
Download or read book Catalog of Worldwide Nuclear Testing written by Viktor Nikitovich Mikhaĭlov and published by Begell House Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Catalog of Worldwide Nuclear Testing is the first ever complete compilation of all nuclear tests. Containing various vital information and data on all 2,049 nuclear tests conducted by the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China (and the recent tests in India and Pakistan), the Catalog presents a uniform classification analysis of the five nuclear weapon states, including the dynamics, yield, and methods of testing. This unique volume has been compiled by a team of the best specialists of the Russian nuclear weapons establishment, headed by the former Minister of Atomic Energy of Russia, Victor Mikhailov, and including the following experts: I. A. Andryushin, A. K. Chemyshev, R. I. Ilkaev, A. M. Matushchenko, L. D. Ryabev, V. G. Srukov, N. P. Voloshin, and Yu. A. Yudin."
Download or read book The Imagineers of War written by Sharon Weinberger and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly sixty years. Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agency’s original mission was to create “the unimagined weapons of the future.” Over the decades, DARPA has been responsible for countless inventions and technologies that extend well beyond military technology. Sharon Weinberger gives us a riveting account of DARPA’s successes and failures, its remarkable innovations, and its wild-eyed schemes. We see how the threat of nuclear Armageddon sparked investment in computer networking, leading to the Internet, as well as to a proposal to power a missile-destroying particle beam by draining the Great Lakes. We learn how DARPA was responsible during the Vietnam War for both Agent Orange and the development of the world’s first armed drones, and how after 9/11 the agency sparked a national controversy over surveillance with its data-mining research. And we see how DARPA’s success with self-driving cars was followed by disappointing contributions to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Weinberger has interviewed more than one hundred former Pentagon officials and scientists involved in DARPA’s projects—many of whom have never spoken publicly about their work with the agency—and pored over countless declassified records from archives around the country, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and exclusive materials provided by sources. The Imagineers of War is a compelling and groundbreaking history in which science, technology, and politics collide.
Download or read book George Wallace Richard Nixon and the Transformation of American Politics written by Dan T. Carter and published by Baylor University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carter addresses the impact of George Wallace on the national political scene, showing how he succeeded in tapping the pulse of American society in the 1960s and 1970s.
