STATE OF JONES, THE(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Amazon Best of the Month, July 2009: Make room in your
understanding of the Civil War for Jones County, Mississippi, where
a maverick small farmer named Newton Knight made a local legend of
himself by leading a civil war of his own against the Confederate
authorities. Anti-planter, anti-slavery, and anti-con*ion,
Knight and thousands of fellow poor whites, army deserters, and
runaway slaves waged a guerrilla insurrection against the secession
that at its peak could claim the lower third of Mississippi as
pro-Union territory. Knight, who survived well beyond the war (and
fathered more than a dozen children by two mothers who lived
alongside each other, one white and one black), has long been a
notorious, half-forgotten figure, and in The State of Jones
journalist Sally Jenkins and Harvard historian John Stauffer
combine to tell his story with grace and passion. Using court
tran*s, family memories, and other sources–and filling the
remaining gaps with stylish evocations of crucial moments in the
wider war–Jenkins and Stauffer connect Knight’s unruly crusade to
a South that, at its moment of crisis, was anything but solid.
–Tom Nissley

　　In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth,
Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted the
Confederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against the
Confederacy. For two years he and other residents of Jones County
engaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyond
the scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almost
forgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and John
Stauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroic
and unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within Civil-War
era Southern society. No man better exemplified these complexities
than Newton Knight, a pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South who
refused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton.