Download or read book Crazy Jim Vance and the Men Who Murdered Him written by Thomas Dotson and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-08-23 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hatfield and McCoy feud, as it is generally perceived by the public, is a fictional story; a tale about a people who never existed, in a land that never was. One of the major characters in the feud story that never actually existed in real life is "Crazy Jim Vance." In the following pages the reader will see the vast difference between the real historical James Vance, Sr., and the feud story character, "Crazy Jim Vance." Unbiased readers who are seeking historical truth will be amazed at the difference between the real man and the fictional feud character. In this, his third book on the Hatfield McCoy Feud, author/historian Thomas Dotson exposes the powerful economic and political cabal in Pikeville, Kentucky that, through a skillful manipulation of the press, created a bad man out of thin air.

Download or read book The Feud written by Dean King and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gripping new history of the most famous blood feud in American history, by the bestselling author of Skeletons on the Zahara. For more than a century, the enduring feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys has been American shorthand for passionate, unyielding, and even violent confrontation. Yet despite numerous articles, books, television shows, and feature films, nobody has ever told the in-depth true story of this legendarily fierce-and far-reaching-clash in the heart of Appalachia. Drawing upon years of original research, including the discovery of previously lost and ignored documents and interviews with relatives of both families, bestselling author Dean King finally gives us the full, unvarnished tale, one vastly more enthralling than the myth. Unlike previous accounts, King's begins in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Hatfields and McCoys lived side-by-side in relative harmony. Theirs was a hardscrabble life of farming and hunting, timbering and moonshining-and raising large and boisterous families-in the rugged hollows and hills of Virginia and Kentucky. Cut off from much of the outside world, these descendants of Scots-Irish and English pioneers spoke a language many Americans would find hard to understand. Yet contrary to popular belief, the Hatfields and McCoys were established and influential landowners who had intermarried and worked together for decades. When the Civil War came, and the outside world crashed into their lives, family members were forced to choose sides. After the war, the lines that had been drawn remained-and the violence not only lived on but became personal. By the time the fury finally subsided, a dozen family members would be in the grave. The hostilities grew to be a national spectacle, and the cycle of killing, kidnapping, stalking by bounty hunters, and skirmishing between governors spawned a legal battle that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and still influences us today. Filled with bitter quarrels, reckless affairs, treacherous betrayals, relentless mercenaries, and courageous detectives, THE FEUD is the riveting story of two frontier families struggling for survival within the narrow confines of an unforgiving land. It is a formative American tale, and in it, we see the reflection of our own family bonds and the lengths to which we might go in order to defend our honor, our loyalties, and our livelihood.

Download or read book Partisans Guerillas and Irregulars written by Steven D. Smith and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays that explore the growing field of conflict archaeology Within the last twenty years, the archaeology of conflict has emerged as a valuable subdiscipline within anthropology, contributing greatly to our knowledge and understanding of human conflict on a global scale. Although archaeologists have clearly demonstrated their utility in the study of large-scale battles and sites of conventional warfare, such as camps and forts, conflicts involving asymmetric, guerilla, or irregular warfare are largely missing from the historical record. Partisans, Guerillas, and Irregulars: Historical Archaeology of Asymmetric Warfare presents recent examples of how historical archaeology can contribute to a better understanding of asymmetric warfare. The volume introduces readers to this growing study and to its historic importance. Contributors illustrate how the wide range of traditional and new methods and techniques of historiography and archaeology can be applied to expose critical actions, sacrifices, and accomplishments of competing groups representing opposing philosophies and ways of life, which are otherwise lost in time. The case studies offered cover significant events in American and world history, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, Indian wars in the Southeast and Southwest, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Prohibition, and World War II. All such examples used here took place at a local or regional level, and several were singular events within a much larger and more complex historic movement. While retained in local memory or tradition, and despite their potential importance, they are poorly, and incompletely addressed in the historic record. Furthermore, these conflicts took place between groups of significantly different cultural and military traditions and capabilities, most taking on a “David vs. Goliath” character, further shaping the definition of asymmetric warfare.

Download or read book Lies Damned Lies and Feud Tales written by Thomas Dotson and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-11-19 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hatfield McCoy Feud was not just a conflict between two mountain families. It was, perhaps even more significantly, a series of overlapping, interlayered conflicts. While feud lore and much of what has passed for feud history focuses on the conflicts between the family of Anse Hatfield and Randolph McCoy, few writers have properly positioned these events as part of a broader struggle between and among all of the local residents, whether they realized it or not, and more powerful economic and political actors who attempted, quite successfully, to amplify and manipulate local conflicts as a means of advancing their own interests. These outside interests, which reached all the way to the door of the governor of Kentucky, had two distinct advantages over the local people. They had control of the press and control of the law. The feud as we know it grew from a complex interaction of various speakers, journalists, lawyers and lawmen, witnesses in court cases, each validating one another's version of events. This book is a great collection of writing about the Hatfield McCoy Feud by my friend Thomas Dotson. I added intros to all of the pieces to provide crucial context for readers who may not be as familiar with the history of the place, its people, and the social, economic, and political forces that drove these events. Everyone knows something about the Hatfield McCoy Feud, but almost everything that people think they know is wrong! Not just a little wrong, either. The feud as it is currently understood was, we argue, a fiction created by powerful men whose aim was to control hundreds of thousands of valuable acres of Pike and Mingo County real estate. This book is important, in my opinion, not just because it rewrites much of what has previously passed for history when it come to the Hatfield McCoy Feud, but also because it begins to chip away at what has passed for the history of the Appalachian people. The land grab that began as early as 1875 with the Bruen Lands Wars in West Virginia resulted in forced transfer of millions of acres of prime land and minerals from local farmers to outside industrialists, and the transformation of a thousands of independent subsistence farming families into a new landless class of impoverished mountaineers. The events of the Hatfield McCoy Feud lie at ground zero of that theft of wealth, and we are still experiencing the repercussions of that theft. If you want to understand how the people of Central Appalachia became poor, this book is an excellent place to start.

Download or read book The Journalist and the Murderer written by Janet Malcolm and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A seminal work and examination of the psychopathology of journalism. Using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit by a convicted murder againt the journalist who wrote a book about his crime, Malcolm delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject. Featuring the real-life lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. In Malcolm's view, neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation. When the text first appeared, as a two-part article in The New Yorker, its thesis seemed so radical and its irony so pitiless that journalists across the country reacted as if stung. Her book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and subsidiary characters in the MacDonald-McGinniss case -- the principals, their lawyers, the members of the jury, and the various persons who testified as expert witnesses at the trial -- Malcolm is always aware of herself as a player in a game that, as she points out, she cannot lose. The journalist-subject encounter has always troubled journalists, but never before has it been looked at so unflinchingly and so ruefully. Hovering over the narrative -- and always on the edge of the reader's consciousness -- is the MacDonald murder case itself, which imparts to the book an atmosphere of anxiety and uncanniness. The Journalist and the Murderer derives from and reflects many of the dominant intellectual concerns of our time, and it will have a particular appeal for those who cherish the odd, the off-center, and the unsolved.

Download or read book Chaos written by Tom O'Neill and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journalist's twenty-year fascination with the Manson murders leads to "gobsmacking" (The Ringer) new revelations about the FBI's involvement in this "kaleidoscopic" (The New York Times) reassessment of an infamous case in American history. Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. With no mercy and seemingly no motive, the Manson Family followed their leader's every order -- their crimes lit a flame of paranoia across the nation, spelling the end of the sixties. Manson became one of history's most infamous criminals, his name forever attached to an era when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia -- or dystopia -- was just an acid trip away. Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up behind the "official" story, including police carelessness, legal misconduct, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents. When a tense interview with Vincent Bugliosi -- prosecutor of the Manson Family and author of Helter Skelter -- turned a friendly source into a nemesis, O'Neill knew he was onto something. But every discovery brought more questions: Who were Manson's real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties? Why didn't law enforcement, including Manson's own parole officer, act on their many chances to stop him? And how did Manson -- an illiterate ex-con -- turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers? O'Neill's quest for the truth led him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from San Francisco's summer of love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with shady cover-ups and suspicious coincidences. The product of two decades of reporting, hundreds of new interviews, and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, Chaos mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. This is a book that overturns our understanding of a pivotal time in American history.

Download or read book Days of Darkness written by John Pearce and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 1994-11-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " Among the darkest corners of Kentucky’s past are the grisly feuds that tore apart the hills of Eastern Kentucky from the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth. Now, from the tangled threads of conflicting testimony, John Ed Pearce, Kentucky’s best known journalist, weaves engrossing accounts of six of the most notorior accounts to uncover what really happened and why. His story of those days of darkness brings to light new evidence, questions commonly held beliefs about the feuds, and us and long-running feuds—those in Breathitt, Clay Harlan, Perry, Pike, and Rowan counties. What caused the feuds that left Kentucky with its lingering reputation for violence? Who were the feudists, and what forces—social, political, financial—hurled them at each other? Did Big Jim Howard really kill Governor William Goebel? Did Joe Eversole die trying to protect small mountain landowners from ruthless Eastern mineral exploiters? Did the Hatfield-McCoy fight start over a hog? For years, Pearce has interviewed descendants of feuding families and examined skimpy court records and often fictional newspapeputs to rest some of the more popular legends.

Download or read book A Man at Arms A Novel written by Steven Pressfield and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed master of historical fiction comes an epic saga about a reluctant hero, the Roman Empire, and the rise of a new faith. Jerusalem and the Sinai desert, first century AD. In the turbulent aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus, officers of the Roman Empire acquire intelligence of a pilgrim bearing an incendiary letter from a religious fanatic to insurrectionists in Corinth. The content of this letter could bring down the empire. The Romans hire a former legionary, the solitary man-at-arms, Telamon of Arcadia, to intercept the letter and capture its courier. Telamon operates by a dark code all his own, with no room for noble causes or lofty beliefs. But once he overtakes the courier, something happens that neither he nor the empire could have predicted. In his first novel of the ancient world in thirteen years, the best-selling author of Gates of Fire and Tides of War returns with a gripping saga of conquest and rebellion, bloodshed and faith.

Download or read book The Sportscaster s Daughter written by Cindi Michael and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the 20 Best Books of 2016, Redbook Magazine Readers’ Favorite Award: Honorable Mention Millions of people watched sportscaster George Michael each week on the Sports Machine, including his daughter Cindi. Cindi Michael appears to live a charmed life: she’s happily married, has a successful career, and is a loving mom to two wonderful children. Yet she longs for a father who hasn’t spoken to her in twenty years, and even secretly watches him on TV when the longing becomes unbearable. When Cindi was eleven, her father fought for sole custody of her and her siblings, raising three children on his own despite being a bachelor and rock ’n’ roll DJ in New York in the 1970s. But with his rising fame as the host of the popular show Sports Machine, his 80-hour-a-week work schedule, and his second marriage, the close relationship Cindi shared with her father began to crack; she did everything to earn his love and attention, but for perfectionist George, it was never enough—and when she was eighteen and a freshman in college, in a burst of anger he told her never to come home again. As the years went on, Cindi struggled to steel her heart while still remaining hopeful that they would one day reconcile, just as her father did with his own dad, and transcend painful family patterns that span generations. Candid, moving, and ultimately hopeful, The Sportscaster’s Daughter is a family story of forgiveness, faith, and strength.

Download or read book S Street Rising written by Ruben Castaneda and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the height of the crack epidemic that decimated the streets of D.C., Ruben Castaneda covered the crime beat for the Washington Post. The first in his family to graduate from college, he had landed a job at one of the country's premier newspapers. But his apparent success masked a devastating secret: he was a crack addict. Even as he covered the drug-fueled violence that was destroying the city, he was prowling S Street, a 24/7 open-air crack market, during his off hours, looking for his next fix. Castaneda's remarkable book, S Street Rising, is more than a memoir; it's a portrait of a city in crisis. It's the adrenalin-infused story of the street where Castaneda quickly became a regular, and where a fledgling church led by a charismatic and streetwise pastorwas protected by the local drug kingpin, a dangerous man who followed an old-school code of honor. It's the story of Castaneda's friendship with an exceptional police homicide commander whose career was derailed when he ran afoul of Mayor Marion Barry and his political cronies. And it's a study of the city itself as it tried to rise above the bloody crack epidemic and the corrosive politics of the Barry era. S Street Rising is The Wire meets the Oscar-winning movie Crash. And it's all true.

Download or read book Hillbilly Elegy written by J. D. Vance and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL BASSO "You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Download or read book An American Vendetta written by T. C. Crawford and published by . This book was released on 2013-06 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Story of Barbarism in the United States. Initially published in 1889, An American Vendetta represented one of the earliest journalistic accounts of the now-famous Hatfield and McCoy Feud. During that time period, many across the country first came to hear of the story through the pages of this book. Besides telling the complex and bloody story of the feud-often in blunt and harsh terms-this volume, penned by New York World reporter, Theron C. Crawford, presents the only known interview with feudist Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield conducted in Hatfield's home in Logan County, West Virginia. At the time of Crawford's writings, the family conflict was at its greatest intensity. The brutal massacre at Randall McCoy's cabin by the Hatfields, which resulted in the death of two of his children, Alifair and Calvin, had taken place just months earlier, on New Year's Day, 1888. One week later, "Crazy Jim" Vance was killed by Hatfield archenemy, "Bad Frank" Phillips. It was in the shadow of this bloody backdrop that Devil Anse, during his interview with Crawford, stressed that he wanted peace with the McCoys-but had no intention of disarming or surrendering to law officers or bounty hunters. Peace, it turns out, was still a few years off. After many decades, American Vendetta, a Hatfield and McCoy Feud classic, is available again. T.C. Crawford's colorful interviews, his vivid description of the region, and the brutal feud accounts make this volume fascinating to read and a must for every library collection. American Vendetta is a valuable work of American history.

Download or read book The Clark Gable and Carole Lombard Murder Case written by George Baxt and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A clever plot, witty innuendo, and plenty of the Hollywood greats for company." - Library Journal As Gone With the Wind approaches release, all the stars but Clark Gable prepare to head for Atlanta for the big premiere. Clark and his wife, Carole Lombard, are too distressed to celebrate the opening of the biggest movie of his career because Lydia Austin, a young actress and a protege of Carole's, is missing. In fact, kidnapping paranoia is sweeping through Hollywood, and even with body-building bodyguards like the two Clark has hired to protect Carole, no one feels safe. But Carole is not a dame to take such threats lying down. Convinced that they can help, she and Clark set themselves up as amateur sleuths. Of course, there are plenty of other celebrities in the mix: W.C. Fields alternates between anxiety over the kidnappings and trying to convince David O. Selznick that he should play Rhett Butler, and Groucho Marx also gets serious (just barely) long enough to worry about the missing girl, who is his current paramour.

Download or read book The Hatfield McCoy Feud After Kevin Costner written by Tom E. Dotson and published by . This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a century we read in books and newspapers and saw on screen, the legend of what is the most famous feud in American history: the Hatfields and the McCoys. What we had was legend, and not history, because the story consisted of a few historical events inside several layers of tall tales and fables reported by the yellow journalists of the late nineteenth century. Except for the raids into West Virginia by Frank Phillips' posse in 1887-8, all the documented events connected to the feud occurred in Pike County, Kentucky. The feud story, like the Phillips posse, was largely made in Pikeville, in 1888. The Pikeville stories were manufactured by men who had two primary goals: 1) They wanted to see a story published which would facilitate the conviction of Wall Hatfield and the other eight members of the Hatfield faction who were in jail in Pikeville, and, 2) They wanted to justify the two cold-blooded murders that had been committed only days before the reporters arrived by the leader of their posse, Frank Phillips. Everything in the early writings of the big city reporters was given to them by men with those two interests foremost in their minds.It is impossible to overstate the importance of the fact that none of the original feud story, which forms the basis for all the succeeding iterations, was taken from the actual record. It is all hearsay, and the hearsay came from the most prejudiced sources imaginable. The Pikeville elite not only had "a dog in the fight," they had the whole damn pack in it.The same moneyed interests that owned the newspapers also wanted the vast mineral riches underlying the land occupied by the Hatfields and McCoys, and their reporters' depictions of the people of Tug Valley as immoral and violent barbarians helped to make the swindle more palatable to the public.The Hatfield and McCoy feud is probably unique among all the events in history in that writers of feud-based fiction are more constrained than are writers of feud history. The good fiction writer is always careful to avoid writing something that is patently impossible. A fiction writer would never say that twelve hundred people regularly attended a church in an isolated mountain hollow that had only two dozen members. A "True Story" of the feud, can say that and still have reviewers from prestigious media organs laud its factual accuracy.As fiction can be made just as exciting as the screenwriter or author desires, the 2012 TV epic, "Hatfields & McCoys," and the recent fictional 'history'' books are great entertainment, but they are not history.Some of the books that followed the Kevin Costner movie contain an even greater ratio of fable to facts than did the movie. With a rare combination of facts and humor, this author calls them all to task.Tom E. Dotson, holder of a Cornell masters degree in labor history, and descended from both the Hatfields and McCoys, asks the question: "When only five Hatfields (along with three McCoys) were among the twenty men indicted for the vigilante slaying of the three McCoys in 1882, and only nine of the forty who rode with the Phillips posse in 1887-8 were McCoys, why is it called 'The Hatfield and McCoy feud'?" With solid research and a unique insight, Dotson answers that question.

Download or read book The Wisconsin Agriculturist written by and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 1206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book White Fragility written by Dr. Robin DiAngelo and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

Download or read book The Lynching of Cleo Wright written by Dominic J. CapeciJr. and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 20, 1942, black oil mill worker Cleo Wright assaulted a white woman in her home and nearly killed the first police officer who tried to arrest him. An angry mob then hauled Wright out of jail and dragged him through the streets of Sikeston, Missouri, before burning him alive. Wright's death was, unfortunately, not unique in American history, but what his death meant in the larger context of life in the United States in the twentieth-century is an important and compelling story. After the lynching, the U.S. Justice Department was forced to become involved in civil rights concerns for the first time, provoking a national reaction to violence on the home front at a time when the country was battling for democracy in Europe. Dominic Capeci unravels the tragic story of Wright's life on several stages, showing how these acts of violence were indicative not only of racial tension but the clash of the traditional and the modern brought about by the war. Capeci draws from a wide range of archival sources and personal interviews with the participants and spectators to draw vivid portraits of Wright, his victims, law-enforcement officials, and members of the lynch mob. He places Wright in the larger context of southern racial violence and shows the significance of his death in local, state, and national history during the most important crisis of the twentieth-century.