Clinton, Louisiana: Society, Politics, and Race Relations in a Nineteenth-Century Southern Small Town

Society, Politics, and Race Relations in a Nineteenth-Century Southern Small Town by V. Elaine Thompson Examining the town's history from 1826 to 1877, Thompson showcases Clinton as a window through which one can view the importance of small towns in the nineteenth-century South. "With its white columned homes and archetypal courthouse square Clinton, Louisiana, exudes the romantic aura of a 'civilization gone with the wind.' Historians, of course, must balance romance with realism. This book does precisely that. Not perhaps since James C. Bonner's classic 1944 study of Milledgeville and Baldwin County, Georgia, has any historian given more sustained and thoughtful attention to the history of a small southern community. Through careful use of census data and a wide range of archival sources, Elaine Thompson takes readers behind the Greek Revival facades so beloved by commercial film makers to reveal the substructure of slavery, violence, exploitation, and Reconstruction political strif