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9780807171530

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Reviews

"Carney has written an urgent and compelling book that traces the life and legacy of Nathan Bedford Forrest across two centuries. Considering the reality, romanticization, and reckoning with equal care and craft, Carney draws out one of the South's and nation's most infamous ghosts and demonstrates how he continues to haunt our politics and culture. Through deep research and insightful analysis, Reckoning with the Devil considers Forrest in his moment, our moment, and every moment in between. - Charles L. Hughes, author of Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South and Why Bushwick Bill Matters """"While Nathan Bedford Forrest has never commanded as much attention as Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson, he has persisted since the Civil War as an iconic figure of white southern resistance. Carney's book expertly traces the movement of Forrest's image through popular culture, in books, advertisements, monuments, ceremonies, and the screen, from his own lifetime to the present, paying particular attention to transformative moments like the Progressive Era, the Southern Agrarian movement, the Shelby-Foote-and-Ken-Burns-fueled resurgence of interest in Forrest in the later twentieth century, and the recent endeavors to remove his memorials, up through the rise of the new right-wing paramilitaries in our own times, providing insight into the changing role of racism within white southern identity over time."""" - Elaine Frantz Parsons, author of Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction """"In his wonderfully creative work, Carney interprets Forrest as resilient, pragmatic, fluid, and, most of all, ambiguous in every part of his life. The former slave trader, Confederate hero, arch-villain of the Fort Pillow massacre, and Klansman could (and did) represent practically any element of the Civil War memorial landscape: autodidactic military genius, violent racist, self-made millionaire, and unreconstructed rebel."""" - John David Smith, author of An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918"

Author Information

Court Carney is professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University. He is the author of Cuttin' Up: How Early Jazz Got America's Ear and coeditor of The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan's Live Performances: Play a Song for Me.

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