As readers of Renegade South know, many Southerners opposed secession and the founding of the Confederacy because of political, religious, or economic principles. Others came later to oppose the Confederacy after facing economic ravages and the threat of death on the battlefield. In North Carolina, a Whig political majority, large yeoman population, and several antislavery or pacifist religious minorities, including Quakers, Wesleyan Methodists and Moravians, all contributed to the state’s strong Unionism, which held throughout the Civil War.
As noted in my first book, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South,many “Abolitionist and Lincolnite” citizens were early on reported in the Randolph County area, which included portions of several counties but was centered in southern Randolph, northeastern Mongomery, and northwestern Moore, all “hotbeds” of Unionism and desertion. Known as “outliers”, deserters led a precarious existence in the thick woods that surrounded their communities. Of fifty traceable Montgomery County deserters and evaders, most were men between twenty-one and thirty-five years old, married with one to three children, and the owners of modest farmsteads. About a quarter were teenagers in 1860 who lived in households headed by widowed mothers. For the most part, these were struggling farm families bonded by kinship and religion.
In 2010, I expanded my research on Southern Unionist families in The Long Shadow of the Civil War.At the same time, I recounted many of North Carolina’s Unionist stories on this blog, including about the Wesleyan Methodist Hulin/Moore family, Bill Owens, leader of a deserter band that terrorized the region’s pro-Confederate community, and the plight of Unionist women. Most Unionists, however, were mindful of being arrested, tortured, or executed and kept a low profile, appearing only fleetingly in public records. In this essay, I focus on one such family: the Lathams of Montgomery County.
In 1860, Harvey Latham was a 25-year-old farmer with combined real and personal property valued at $325. Two years earlier, he had married Amy Nichols, a young woman from his community. The following year, the couple welcomed their first child, a daughter named Lon. Like most rural families of the antebellum South, the Lathams were not literate, nor did they use enslaved labor. As their parents did before them, they produced most of their own food and reared their children on land that they owned. On 12 April 1861, these arduous but familiar rituals of life were upended by the declaration of Civil War between the North and the South. Despite North Carolina’s strong support for the United States, its legislators voted to join the Confederacy after President Lincoln called for volunteers to put down South Carolina’s rebellious firing on Fort Sumter. On 9 September 1861, Harvey joined many of his neighbors in enlisting as a private in Company K of the 34th NC Infantry of the Confederate army. Almost exactly one year later, he deserted his unit.
Harvey LathamAmy Nichols Latham
Harvey Latham’s desertion plunged the family into the maelstrom of divided communities in which deserting men went into in hiding, while Confederate troops and vigilantes went on the hunt for them. Women from both sides of the divide were forced to take charge of farms and raise children alone. While many wives and mothers of deserters shielded their husbands from capture and complained bitterly to Governor Zeb Vance about Confederate abuses of Unionist families, Confederate women complained just as bitterly about deserter depredations.
The wartime court records of Montgomery County reveal arrests of many men and women who had never before been publicly charged with a crime. For example, on 15 July 1864, Harvey Latham, his brother James, and his brother-in-law, Gilbert Nichols, joined a gang of men charged with assaulting John Brewer, a stalwart Confederate, “near the highway”, where they also took his gun from him. Hiram Hulin, the pro-Union patriarch of the Hulin family, served as a witness for the men’s defense. That same year, Harvey Latham’s brother Enzor was charged alongside several other men, including Hiram’s sons, John and William, with robbing William Burney of several personal items. Court records show that several Confederate authorities retaliated in March 1964 by robbing nine Unionist men, including Harvey Latham. Ongoing attacks and counter attacks culminated in January 1865 when all three of Hiram Hulin’s outlier sons, John, Jesse, and William, were murdered. Although Hiram identified Henry Plott as his sons’ killer, Plott was never brought to justice.
A farm woman during the Civil WarDeserters of the Confederacy, 1861Enzor Latham
As early as August 1864 the inner civil war that raged throughout the Randolph County area prompted one militia officer to exclaim, “the women is as bad as the men down here.” As the Civil War approached its end, women’s retaliation against Montgomery County’s Confederate elite increased even more. On 27 January 1865, just days after Confederates killed the Hulin brothers, Martha Sheets was arrested for threatening to enlist deserters to punish Sheriff Aaron Sanders, one of the county’s richest men, unless he provided her family with four bushels of grain. Martha’s threat against the Sheriff was no isolated case. On 1 May 1865, ten women from the same community, including Harvey Latham’s wife Amy and Amy’s sister, Ally Nichols, rioted “with sticks, staves, & clubs” at Sheriff Sanders’ flour mill. Like Martha, the women were promptly arrested.
Just months before the war’s end, Emsley Beckerdite, a Randolph County justice of the peace, implored newspaper editor M. S. Robins to consider whether “the people, the bone and sinew of this once great country, were ever legitimately consulted on the question of secession”. Although Robins’ response to Beckerdite is unknown, history has answered his question. In waging a war to save slavery from extinction under the shield of constitutional authority, the Confederacy devastated the lives of innumerable families of farmers and laborers. The people fought back with a vengeance, hastening the fall of the Confederacy and with it, the institution of slavery.
Last September, I was honored to discuss my new book, Deep Roots, Broken Branches, at the 2025 Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson. Below is a video of the “Mississippi Memoirs” panel, moderated by Ellen Ann Fentress and featuring Catherine Simone Gray, Adam Gussow, Lauren Rhoades, and me.
Professor Thomas Alter was first fired by Texas State University on September 10, 2025 for remarks made at a socialist conference. After a brief court-ordered reinstatement, the university upheld and finalized his dismissal on October 13, 2025. Both actions were taken without due process. Alter is a historian of Texas and of labor and the working class. In this interview he is speaking in a personal capacity.
TM: Can you tell us something about your career as a historian, your research interests, and how you became interested in the things that you study?
TA: My interest in labor history and working class-based social movements goes back a few decades. I started as an undergraduate history major at Indiana University in the early and mid-90s. I was radicalized by a lot of the things going on in the labor movement at the time. This was when the Caterpillar workers were on strike, and also the United Rubber Workers on strike at Bridgestone-Firestone and the A.E. Staley lockout. And I learned how many people within our own class, the working class, didn’t know our own history. That was part of my motivation to start doing research on working class history.
I was living in Austin, Texas starting in 2000, and then I entered the master’s history program at Texas State University in 2005. Through faculty like Gregg Andrews and Vicki Bynum, I was able to get into Texas working class history projects. That became the origins of my book, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth. At the time, outside of James Green’s fantastic book, Grass-Roots Socialism from 1978, there wasn’t much out there. Now, other historians have done good work, but I found a lack of Texas working class history, and I was drawn to uncover this history that’s just sitting there waiting to be told.
TM: Are you a native Texan, or did you wind up there in graduate school?TA: I have a mixed Indiana and Texas background. My family is originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, a very industrial, working class city. In 1986, when I was 12, my family moved to Houston. So that shaped me. I’ve had this mixed back-and-forth between Indiana and Texas, with a few other places like Chicago and Minneapolis sprinkled in.
TM: Tell us about your career at Texas State University.
TA: I got my master’s at Texas State in 2008. It’s a terminal master’s program, so I went to the University of Illinois at Chicago for my PhD. I was on the job market and got a lecturer position at Texas State in the fall of 2017. I enjoyed my time there as a graduate student and liked the faculty. While I was a lecturer, a tenure track position in Texas history came up.
Based largely on my book being under contract and my exemplary teaching record, I got the tenure track position. In many ways, it was a dream job. I like being in Central Texas, and Texas State is a majority minority university with a lot of first generation college students and students from working class backgrounds. Those are the students I wanted to teach.
Dr. Tom Alter [Photo: GoFundMe – Kim Gasper-Rabuck]
I passed all my teaching evaluations. Until you get tenure, a senior faculty member reviews your teaching every semester. My student evaluations were positive. I was fulfilling service to the university. I was supervising five graduate students’ master’s theses… because students were attracted to labor history. I had met my service and teaching obligations, and my contributions to the field with articles, book reviews, and my book. I had a spotless record with no complaints from students about indoctrination. And I’ve even had conservative students tell me they appreciate my unbiased presentation of history.
I wanted my classrooms to be unbiased; let’s teach the history. As a Marxist, you don’t need to make things up about US history; you stick with the facts. There’s a lot of tragedy, but also a lot of triumph, like the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement. I wasn’t teaching students to hate America, and no students complained of that.
TM: The administration doesn’t seem to have given any consideration to the damage inflicted on students when a professor is effectively disappeared from the classroom in the middle of the semester. What’s going on with your students and graduate students now?
TA: It’s been very derailing for some of my graduate students to have their advisor just disappear. I was cut off from my Texas State email and removed from the classroom without due process. It was sudden and immediate, not a years-long process. I had students looking to graduate this semester. Some found other capable faculty to step in, but it’s been very disruptive. The graduate seminar I was teaching had to be completely redone two weeks into the semester. It’s been jarring to the students’ learning experiences.
TM: What the Texas State administration has done brings to mind some of the most shameful chapters in American history—like the McCarthy period and the Red Scare—but maybe it’s more similar to the Third Reich, where professors are just taken out of their classrooms.
TA: Yes, McCarthyism has come up. But this echoes fascist Italy in the 1920s and the beginnings of the Third Reich, the purging of universities of Marxist and leftist professors. In the McCarthy era, there was usually some type of process, even if it was a sham kangaroo court. Here, I was dismissed. There was a court-ordered reinstatement, but then the process Texas State went through was a hearing with the president, Kelly Damphousse, where the judge and prosecutor were one and the same, not following 85 years of established academic norms set up by the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) since 1940. That’s just been completely abolished.
TM: One thing that makes your case distinctive is that you are a historian of labor and the working class. In effect, the university is censoring this subject. So I think a particular value in speaking to you is to talk about what they don’t want students to hear anymore. And so I want to talk about Texas working class history.
It’s a state with a unique history because of its vastness; it’s a southern state, a plains state, and western state, and it’s the state that is arguably most tied to Mexico and Latin America. On top of all of that, Texas has a huge and diverse working class. Tell us about Texas. I think it’s misportrayed by both the right wing and the liberal media, which tends to blame the working class people of Texas for the state’s reactionary politics.
TA: Texas is an amazing place. When I leave, people say they feel sorry for me, but I love it, minus the present government. I fell in love with it when I was 12 and my family moved to Houston, which is one of the most diverse cities in the entire country.
Texas is a transnational space and has been for a very long time. As you say, it’s a southern state, a western state, a plains state, with ties to Mexico. With Houston, you have ties to the world, a large and diverse Asian population. There’s so much to learn from. That’s what makes Texas such an interesting and politically important place. Size alone makes it important, but also the different sections of the working class. And then there are the elites. With cotton and then oil, two drivers of capitalist wealth accumulation, the Texas political and economic elites have wielded a lot of influence.
TM: And again when we turn to its history, Texas is more complicated than the stereotype. There was, for example, opposition to the Confederacy in Texas, as elsewhere in the South—as Victoria Bynum has shown for Mississippi and other historians have for eastern Tennessee and other areas. And in Texas this opposition seems to be concentrated among the German immigrants, the 48ers, which is a central concern of your book.
TA: There was a trickle of German immigration beginning in the 1830s and 1840s. After the counter-revolution against the 1848 revolution, many politically minded German refugees settled in Texas. While many settled in the Midwest–Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati–about 30,000 came to Texas, seeking to build a new life where they could maintain their German culture and political beliefs. They weren’t utopian socialists, but they sought to put their beliefs into practice. They underestimated how entrenched the slavocracy was and the lengths slave owners would go to defend slavery. And so they went from the Prussian reactionary monarchy to confronting the slavocracy in Texas.
There was resistance, a bushwhack war, guerrilla warfare in the hill country. There was the Nueces Massacre, where German immigrants trying to get to Mexico to hook up with the Union Army were ambushed by Confederates and slaughtered. And there’s also a history of socialism. Adolph Douai is credited as one of the first to bring Marxist socialism to the United States. He was an abolitionist, who started an anti-slavery newspaper in San Antonio but had to leave after a few years.
There was resistance, which is why Texas was different. The state had a referendum on whether to join the Confederacy. It wasn’t a fair election, with violence and intimidation, but the fact that they had a referendum shows the sentiment against it. The German counties in Central Texas and Anglo farmers in North Texas along the Red River, who were not slave owners, voted against it. So, there’s a long history of resistance in Texas.
Adolf Douai (1819-1888) a German Forty-Eighter (a revolutionary refugee) who was a prominent socialist, abolitionist, and educator in Texas
TM: And the Texas slavocracy’s reaction against the Germans shows that this anti-immigrant politics isn’t new to the ruling class, either. That allows a segue into the relationship with Mexico and Latin America. Could you say something about the complicated border and the relationship with people of Mexican and Latin American ancestry, a crucially important part of the working class in Texas?
TA: Neither Mexico nor Spain truly controlled Texas; it was very much Indian territory, particularly Comanche territory. In the early 19th century, there were about 40,000 Native peoples and only about 2,500 Spanish and then Mexican settlers. You had Tejano elites and a Mexican working class. Some Tejano elites, trying to figure out how to enrich themselves and settle the land further, worked with Anglo settlers to bring slavery into Texas. This put free labor in a tough position, competing against slave labor.
A map of Mexico from 1832/1835, depicting Texas–then Tejas–as part of the country. [Photo: Yana & Marty Davis Map Collection]
You had some Tejano elites in Texas encouraging US southerners to bring slavery, but also people in Mexico who wanted nothing to do with it. Mexico was influenced by the Enlightenment and saw slavery as contradictory to ideas of freedom and liberty. That conflict became part of the Texas independence struggle.
Someone has said, and I believe it’s true, that the Republic of Texas was the first slave owners’ republic because it specifically entrenched slavery, whereas the US Constitution was more iffy on it. The Republic of Texas was very clear: slavery was enshrined in it. The Anglo settlers wanted more representation, but it was in a white supremacist, Anglo framework. It was bourgeois freedom and democracy for Anglo elites, not for the working class and definitely not for ending slavery.
TM: Could you say something about Albert and Lucy Parsons, two Texans who are important figures in the history of the American working class?
TA: The Parsons were in many ways representative of the Texas working class. Albert Parsons was from Alabama, ended up in Waco, got swept up in Confederate patriotism, saw the realities of war, and came back advocating for freedmen’s rights through a newspaper. He fell in love with Lucy Parsons, a person of African American and Mexican ancestry. They championed black rights.
After Reconstruction ended sooner in Texas, they went to Chicago, saw the labor struggles there, and radicalized further into anarchists after seeing the state shoot workers in the street. They embodied the diversity of Texas, the legacies of conquest, slavery, the Confederacy, and working class resistance to those events. They left Texas largely due to their interracial marriage making them a target. It was old 48er German networks that got them from Texas to Chicago.
Lucy Parsons (1851-1942) and Albert Parsons (1848-1887). Albert Parsons was among the Haymarket Martyrs.
You see that spirit in Texas. There’s a spirit of independence, that old populism. Texas was the heart of independent populism, not fused with the Democratic Party like in the Midwest. You still see that independent populist streak. What you see in Texas politics is this struggle over who can tap into that populist streak and anger.
Economics sits at the heart of populism; it was poor landowning farmers losing their land and becoming tenant farmers, seeing that Wall Street, railroads and middlemen were cheating them. They saw clearly that they were producing the wealth but others were gaining it. Now, the Republican Party, especially under Trump, has been able to capture that populist angst and spirit of independence.
Teaching Texas history becomes a political battleground over whether you teach the heroic Anglo-Texan white supremacist narrative or the actual history. I just teach the actual history, warts, triumphs and tragedies. That becomes a threat because you ask where that populist anger actually comes from, and it goes back to the German 48ers, the Greenback Labor Party, the People’s Party and the Knights of Labor. The rise and fall of the Knights of Labor, the largest labor organization of the 1800s, has Texas roots.
Teaching these basic facts tears down that heroic Anglo narrative. There is something unique about Texas history, but it’s not just “Remember the Alamo.” There’s a true history of working class resistance and independent political action. The People’s Party was flawed, but many Texas populists transitioned to the Socialist Party. There is a true spirit of working class political independence here, and that’s what they’re trying to repress. They don’t want that history taught because it could become an example with lessons for working class people on ways to resist.
TM: As opposed to many labor historians, you take a more critical view of the New Deal and its role in bringing an end to this fascinating history of resistance. What is your take on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and how is it different from the standard narrative?
TA: The standard narrative is that Franklin Roosevelt saved the working class through New Deal reforms, giving them the right to unionize, the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), Social Security and the minimum wage. I have a different take. I argue that there was a farmer-labor bloc, a continuity of independent working class parties and organizations from the 1870s to the 1920s. The presence of these parties—the Greenback Labor Party, the People’s Party, the Socialist Party—is what put pressure on the Democrats and Republicans to enact reforms in the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Eugene Debs getting six per cent of the vote in close elections meant they had to make inroads. In the absence of this independent political action, we haven’t seen any true major economic reforms since. Roosevelt was saving capitalism, as he made clear.
The National Labor Relations Board was actually a setback for the working class. Before, the working class was contesting for power directly through strikes and parties. With the NLRB, the state becomes an arbiter. And in a capitalist state, it’s not neutral. Instead of settling disputes on the picket line, where the working class has power by withholding labor, it gets caught up in NLRB elections.
Many veterans of the farmer-labor struggles in Texas hoped to capture the Democratic Party, but they failed, lost their political independence, and hence the working class lost a lot. Since then, we haven’t had major economic reforms. So I don’t see the New Deal as a great celebratory thing; in many ways, it demobilized the working class, especially the sense of independent political action, which had a long tradition in the US.
TM: That brings us to the evolution of Texas politics since then. Texas didn’t always have the most reactionary politicians. It could produce reformist figures like Ralph Yarborough, and you had Fred Harris in neighboring Oklahoma. And even Johnson presented himself as a New Deal-style reformist politician.
But now you have a political class that seems to have lost its mind. What it really represents are the 80-some billionaires in Texas who hoard wealth of $800 billion. Of course, the whole American ruling class is racing to the right at breakneck speed. But Texas seems to be the pace setter.
Ralph Yarborough (1903-1996), US Senator from Texas, 1957-1971
TA: The standard history points to Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act and saying as an aside to an aide that he had just handed the South to the Republican Party. But there’s a longer history of conservative Democratic opposition to labor and civil rights. Then the Republicans were able to manipulate that independent Texas streak.
The Democrats were the establishment in a one-party state. The new oil and aerospace money, playing up anti-establishment politics, allowed the Republicans to tap into the populist streak. They positioned themselves as opposition to Washington bureaucrats. The language of “right to work” sounds good, but it was anti-civil rights and anti-union. They were able to play on that. There were banking scandals in the 1970s involving Democratic politicians, and Republicans were able to come in as outsiders against corrupt politicians, even though they were the wealthy elites. Many Republicans, like Rick Perry, were originally Democrats because that was the party in charge, and they rebranded once things shifted.
TM: Thank you for speaking with us. Before we end, can you give us an update on your case and where things stand and what people who read this can do to help.
TA: Right now, the main thing is a campaign aimed at the Texas State Board of Regents, who are hearing an appeal for my reinstatement. There is a subcommittee meeting on November 10 in Austin, and then the full board is meeting on November 20 and 21 in Huntsville. People are asked to send emails to the Board either as an academic or part of the general public through an Action Network email campaign.
In early November 2024, I submitted my completed manuscript, Deep Roots, Broken Branches: A History and Memoir, to the University Press of Mississippi. As the author of three previous historical works, I relished the opportunity to write a five-generation history of my family as well as myself, to go beyond the interesting but limited perspectives of ancestral stories passed down through the years. In addition to telling family stories, I placed us on the stage of history—much as I have done for many readers of my blog, Renegade South, who have contacted me over the years to thank me for telling their ancestors’ histories, often adding their own stories, photos, and documents.
I could not have written this history/memoir, or maintained my Renegade Southblog for over fifteen years, without my own specific training in history. It was research into my father’s life that led me to write The Free State of Jones, the story of a class uprising against the Confederacy that later became a movie. In turn, Deep Roots, Broken Branches tells the story of abolitionist Welsh immigrants drawn into the United States’ bloody Civil War, of German immigrants under siege in Minnesota’s Dakota War of 1862; of my grandmother’s experiences as a “New Woman” of the Progressive Era; of her and my grandfather’s devastating experience of the Great Depression; of antisemitism and two world wars. Without my knowledge of Black as well as labor history, I might not have discovered the lynching of three Black men in Duluth, Minnesota, in the aftermath of the Great Steel Strike of 1919 that eventually ended my grandfather’s work as a locomotive engineer on the Mesabi Range.
Mary Daniel, “New Woman”, 1910
Welsh Immigrants, The Civil War
The Great Steel Strike, 1919
Duluth Lynching Memorial
The Mesabi Range
Likewise, the significance of my own experiences as an Air Force child growing up in an era of Cold War militarism and racial segregation might have eluded me had I not become a historian of class, race, and gender. Without that education, the liberating effect of my family’s military transfer from segregated Florida to integrated California, followed by a tumultuous year in a midwestern “Sundown” town that allowed no Blacks within its city limits after sundown, might only have been the individual story of a confused adolescent girl surrounded by forces she did not understand. In short, without historical context, the twists and turns of my ancestors’ lives, and my own, would have made little sense to me or to my readers.
A few days after I submitted my manuscript to the press, Donald Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States. Although my faith in the political party system of the United States had long since faded, I was shocked and demoralized by the depth of voter desperation and political callousness that elevated a supremely unqualified candidate to the highest office in the land—not once, but twice. The nation had survived Trump’s first presidency, but the conditions that produced him had not been fixed and the worst was yet to come.
As a citizen, I’m horrified by the Trump Administration’s rapid creation of an authoritarian state disturbingly reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich of the 1930s. As a historian, I’m equally sickened by Trump’s and other politicians’ attacks on higher education. With gleeful cooperation by red state governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas, the state in which I reside, the Trump Administration is diving in headfirst to dismantle university courses that focus on race, gender, and class. They have fired professors who speak on forbidden topics both in and outside of classrooms. The recent firing of my friend and colleague, historian and socialist activist Tom Alter, from Texas State University delivered a blow to all who know and care about him and his family. But attacks on university professors and curriculums are more than personal. Tom’s recent book on working class history is one of many cited in Deep Roots, Broken Branches. His firing, alongside current political attacks on curriculum, threatens to destroy the very heart of scholarly research and the integrity of the history profession.
BOOKISH BUZZ — AUGUST 21, 2025 It’s Official! 2025 SCHEDULES NOW ONLINE! The Mississippi Book Festival is ready to celebrate with you. Check out this year’s schedules and features that will make this literary lawn party one for the books!
* CONTINUING FEATURES THAT WERE A HIT LAST YEAR * Convenient flipbook and interactive map for planning ahead–Venue located at First Baptist Church–Plenty of parking in a dozen designated lots and garages–Capitol Police patroling every parking lot–Book signings will once again run until 5:45 pm, after the last round of panels–More kids workshops–Two food pavilions with food truck fare along both sides of the festival site–Grab ‘n’ go food tent near Galloway Church on Congress Street–Two cooling stations–Air-conditioned portalets.
* IMPORTANT * We’ll have everything a booklover could want, but NO ATM. So, bring some cash. Not all vendors take cards.–Expect wanding and bag checks at all entrances at Galloway and the State Capitol.–Panel sessions in Galloway Sanctuary require an arm band. There’s truly something for everyone.
Join the Literary Lawn Party | 9.13.25 FREE and open to the public, the Mississippi Book Festival draws thousands to its annual “literary lawn party” held in and around the State Capitol Building. Since its debut in 2015, this non-profit has celebrated writing, reading, and our literary heritage, as well as connected readers with hundreds of contemporary authors.
Mississippi Book Festival, Capitol Building, Jackson, MS, September 13, 2025
I’m honored and excited to participate in this year’s festival! On Saturday, September 13, at 2:45 PM, I will discuss Deep Roots, Broken Branches with the panel on “Mississippi Memoirs” on the grounds of the Old State Capitol in Jackson. Booksigning to follow at 4:15 PM.
“Bynum’s grandmother emerges as a stabilizing force, her letters and guidance offering a lifeline through the turbulence of divorce, single motherhood, and academic ambition. This resonated deeply with my public health work on intergenerational trauma healing; Bynum’s story mirrors research showing how even one supportive figure can disrupt cycles of abuse and neglect.”—Sarah Jensen, sociologist and public health professional.
“Deep Roots, Broken Branches isn’t sentimental, and it doesn’t offer easy closure. But it’s honest in a way that’s rare. For anyone trying to understand how personal history intertwines with broader forces of race, class, gender, and geography—especially in the American South—this book is essential. And for those of us who call Jones County home, it’s personal.”—Jonathan Odell, novelist and memoirist
Mary Daniel, circa 1897Vikki Bynum, 1962
Overview
The Mississippi Book Festival, a nonprofit founded by literacy advocates, launched in August 2015 on the State Capitol grounds and continues to draw thousands to its annual “literary lawn party” and book lovers’ celebration. Visit our archive festival pages for highlights, pictures and videos of past festivals.
Impact
Our 10th anniversary festival was a stellar showcase of the very best. On Saturday, September 14th, over 8,000 people attended indoor panel discussions, while hundreds more enjoyed outdoor festival offerings. Add in pre-festival events, for local schools and early kickoffs across the state, and we reached more than 37,500 booklovers in our 7-day celebration.
Authors
Hundreds of contemporary authors — national, regional and local — connect directly with fans and new readers, as invited guests on Official Panels that explore in-depth themes, or along Authors Alley, the festival’s hub for self-published authors.
Have you ever wondered how historical events impacted your ancestors or how the choices and traumas of one generation influences the next? Those are some of the questions that inspired me to write DEEP ROOTS, BROKEN BRANCHES. Please join me at PecanTown, my favorite bookstore and cafe, for a reading and discussion of my new book.
On May 3, 2025, I delivered my paper on the Free State of Jones to the 2nd Annual Central Coast Conference in Monterey, California. The theme was “Seldom Heard History of the Civil War Era” and I was among six featured speakers. Sadly, due to multiple cancelled and delayed flights, I never got off the ground from Austin. Thanks to Zoom, however, I nevertheless delivered my paper, which is now available via YouTube for all to view.
Beginning today, 5/14/25, University Press of Mississippi is offering a 55% website discount on all books, including Deep Roots, Broken Branches.Every book on the site, hardback and paperback, will be 55% off, AND you’ll receive free US shipping with no minimum purchase required! This sale will run from May 14 through May 23. THIS IS A WEBSITE ONLY SALE,meaning no checks or phone orders will be accepted at the website sale pricing.
If you are unfamiliar with ordering from UPM’s website, you might want to view thisInstruction Video.
Renegade South 