Sunday, December 05, 2010

What is Stanley Harrold reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Stanley Harrold, author of Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War.

His entry begins:
I’m reading Douglas R. Egerton’s Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War, which Bloomsbury Press published this past September. “Year of Meteors” comes from Walt Whitman’s poem expressing his feelings about the months between the December 1859 execution of John Brown for treason against the state of Virginia and the presidential election of November 1860. Whitman called it a “brooding year,” as the specter of southern secession and civil war hung over the nation.

One of Egerton’s achievements lies in lending a sense of...[read on]
Stanley Harrold is professor of history at South Carolina State University. Among his recent books are Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C. 1828-1865 and The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves.

Among the early praise for Harrold's Border War:
"Arguing for a broader definition of politics, Stanley Harrold successfully takes us into relatively uncharted waters, insisting that, by running away, slaves had a profound effect on the politics of slavery both on the border between slavery and freedom where it was most vulnerable and on the national level."
--Richard J. M. Blackett, Vanderbilt University

"A good addition to all Civil War collections."
--Library Journal
Read more about Border War at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test Border War.

Writers Read: Stanley Harrold.

--Marshal Zeringue