Mixed Race Studies

The Two Lives of Sally Miller: A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans

Rutgers University Press
2007-03-28
168 pages
9 b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4058-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4057-3

Carol Wilson, Arthur A. and Elizabeth R. Knapp Professor of American History
Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland

In 1843, the Louisiana Supreme Court heard the case of a slave named Sally Miller, who claimed to have been born a free white person in Germany. Sally, a very light-skinned slave girl working in a New Orleans cafe, might not have known she had a case were it not for a woman who recognized her as Salom Muller, with whom she had emigrated from Germany over twenty years earlier. Sally decided to sue for her freedom, and was ultimately freed, despite strong evidence contrary to her claim.

In The Two Lives of Sally Miller, Carol Wilson explores this fascinating legal case and its reflection on broader questions about race, society, and law in the antebellum South. Why did a court system known for its extreme bias against African Americans help to free a woman who was believed by many to be a black slave? Wilson explains that while the notion of white enslavement was shocking, it was easier for society to acknowledge that possibility than the alternative-an African slave who deceived whites and triumphed over the system.

Comments by Carol Wilson from her website:

…My book on the case of Sally Miller looks at a similar issue of status. As a society we have recently begun openly acknowledging that many people in the United States are of mixed racial background. The restrictive categorization of people as either white or black has begun to collapse. Many people assume, however, that this is the result of relaxing of racial barriers over the last few decades. Scholars of pre-Civil War American history, however, are well aware of the extensiveness of racial mixing in our nation’s past, albeit a practice usually illegal and denied. Because of the not uncommon existence of enslaved mulattoes, antebellum Americans were not unused to seeing slaves who looked “white.” With racial identity a feature imposed by those in power in society, it was only a matter of time before “whites” (people of European ancestry) found themselves illegally enslaved. Because white status was impossible to prove, some whites did find themselves in slavery…

An Illuminated Life: Bella da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege

W. W. Norton & Company
June 2007
592 pages
6.6 × 9.6 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-05104-9

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame

Named a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

The secret life of the sensational woman behind the Morgan masterpieces, who lit up New York society.

What would you give up to achieve your dream? When J. P. Morgan hired Belle da Costa Greene in 1905 to organize his rare book and manuscript collection, she had only her personality and a few years of experience to recommend her. Ten years later, she had shaped the famous Pierpont Morgan Library collection and was a proto-celebrity in New York and the art world, renowned for her self-made expertise, her acerbic wit, and her flirtatious relationships. Born to a family of free people of color, Greene changed her name and invented a Portuguese grandmother to enter white society. In her new world, she dined both at the tables of the highest society and with bohemian artists and activists. She also engaged in a decades-long affair with art critic Bernard Berenson. Greene is pure fascination—the buyer of illuminated manuscripts who attracted others to her like moths to a flame.

The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2007
384 pages
5.5 × 8.3 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-33029-8

Martha Hodes, Professor of History
New York University

Finalist for the Lincoln Book Prize.

Award-winning historian Martha Hodes brings us into the extraordinary world of Eunice Connolly. Born white and poor in New England, Eunice moved from countryside to factory city, worked in the mills, then followed her husband to the Deep South. When the Civil War came, Eunice’s brothers joined the Union army while her husband fought and died for the Confederacy. Back in New England, a widow and the mother of two, Eunice barely got by as a washerwoman, struggling with crushing depression. Four years later, she fell in love with a black sea captain, married him, and moved to his home in the West Indies. Following every lead in a collection of 500 family letters, Hodes traced Eunice’s footsteps and met descendants along the way. This story of misfortune and defiance takes up grand themes of American history—opportunity and racism, war and freedom—and illuminates the lives of ordinary people in the past.

Midwinter 1881, Ellen Merrill received a letter. It came from the West Indies, written by a man Ellen didn’t know, and the news was bad. That was clear from the second sentence, in which the stranger spoke of “the late Mr. and Mrs. Connolly.” When Ellen reached the end of the letter, she read it again, and then again, before she took out a sheet of paper. “My Dear Brother,” she wrote to Henry Richardson, “I have at last succeeded in learning the fate of Mrs. Connolly and family.” She asked Henry to impart the news to their mother and to their sister Ann McCoy. As Ellen signed off, she thought about dangerous weather. “We had a Storm here last week which blowd the tide in and nearly washed us away for three days.” She posted the letter from Mississippi to Massachusetts.

The hurricane that swirled off the Miskito Cays of Central America in September 1877 took the life of an American woman named Eunice Connolly. Eunice was an ordinary woman who led an extraordinary life by making momentous decisions within a world that offered her few choices. Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly was born white and working class in New England in 1831. She married a fellow New Englander who took her to the South and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, while Eunice’s two brothers fought for the Union. After the war, Eunice married a well-to-do man of color and went to live in a settlement of former slaves on the British Caribbean island of Grand Cayman. This book tells her story…

…Eunice’s story and the choices she made expose the complexities of racial classification across geographical borders. Her family traced their lineage back to England and France, but as Eunice worked in the mills and labored as a servant, she came precariously close to the degraded status of impoverished Irish and black women. Later, when she married a “man of color” (that was the phrase invoked at the time), she found out that reputation also counted in a person’s racial status and that for women, whiteness depended upon specific ideas about purity. Then, when Eunice took up residence on a West Indian island, she realized that labels like “white,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “colored” carried different meanings in different places. Eunice’s story illuminates the complexities of racism too: Her unusual experiences make clear just how mercurial racial categories could be in the nineteenth century, but her life also proves just how much power those mercurial markers could exert to confine—or transform—a person’s life. In her voyages from New England to the Deep South to the British Caribbean, Eunice also made a journey from the life of an impoverished white woman in the United States to the life of an elite woman of color in the West Indies…

Read chapter 1 in PDF or HTML format.

Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears – Her Life and Writings

Boydell & Brewer
1995-01-01
320 pages
23.4 x 15.6 cm
Paperback ISBN 13: 9780852555354

Gillian Stead Eilersen

This biography details the life of Bessie Head – a life which echoes so many of the aspects of the distressing history of South Africa in the last half century. She was born in an asylum to a mother who was considered mad because her father was black. Despite the disadvantages of being both a person of mixed race and a woman, she made her way in South Africa as a journalist. Her exile in rural Botswana was in marked contrast to the intensely urban backgrounds of most other South African writers. Her fierce determination to take root was reflected in her first novel Where Rain Clouds Gather. But she was kept a refugee for 15 years before she was granted citizenship of Botswana. Her most frightening novel, A Question of Power vividly captures the shifting dislocations of schizophrenia.

The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow

Pendragon Press
March 2006
566 pages
ISBN: 9781576471098

Gabriel Banat

The Chevalier de Saint-Georges, born Joseph Bologne, was the son of an African slave and a French plantation owner on the island of Guadeloupe. The story of his improbable rise in French society, his life as a famous fencer, celebrated violinist-composer and conductor, and later commander of a colored regiment in the French Revolution, should, on the facts alone, gladden the heart of the most passionate romance novelist. Yet, the information disseminated about this illustre inconnu is found in an extravagant nineteenth-century novel, which contains more fiction than fact. Unfortunately, many of the author’s flights of fancy have found their way into serious works about Saint-Georges. Gabriel Banat has set about systematically dispelling the confusion, for the real story is easily as fascinating as any flight of fancy. Gabriel Banat has been a professional violinist all his life; recitalist and member of the New York Philharmonic, he has systematically scoured the violin repertory for interesting and even unknown music. He came across the works of St. Georges and was fascinated by the freshness and charm of these 18th-century compositions. Eventually, he edited a critical edition of all the violin music and, inevitably, began a systematic investigation into the life of this intriguing and multifaceted individual, utilizing archives of the French Land Army, official clippings and untapped personal diaries of St. Georges’ contemporaries. Banat is the author of an authoritative monograph on St. Georges in the Black Music Research Journal.

Gabriel Banat has been a professional violinist all his life: recitalist and member of the New York Philharmonic, he has systematically scoured the violin repertory for interesting and even unknown music. He is the author of an authoritative monograph on St. Georges in the Black Music Research Journal.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xii
Preface xiv
Necrology xviii
Chapter 1 The Island 1
Chapter 2 Joseph 5
Chapter 3 The Trial 12
Chapter 4 A Fugitive Family 22
Chapter 5 The Bologne Plantation 27
Chapter 6 People ¿of Color¿ 37
Chapter 7 Return to France 40
Chapter 8 Paris 46
Chapter 9 The Prodigy 54
Chapter 10 Too Many Blacks 67
Chapter 11 The Chevalier de Saint-Georges 76
Chapter 12 A Young Man About Town 90
Chapter 13 Virtuoso 97
Chapter 14 Gossec 113
Chapter 15 The New Bow 119
Chapter 16 Composions- Quartets and Concertos 125
Chapter 17 Gluck and Marie Antoinette 140
Chapter 18 Concertos andSymphonie Concertantes 159
Chapter 19 TheOpéra Affair 177
Chapter 20 Ernestine 193
Chapter 21 Mme. de Montesson
Chapter 22 Mme. de Montalembert
Chapter 23 L¿Amant Anonyme
Chapter 24 Le Concert des Amateurs
Chapter 25 The Grand Orient of France
Chapter 26 Le Concert Olympique
Chapter 27 Le Palais-Royal
Chapter 28 London
Chapter 29 The Gathering Storm
Chapter 30 The Bastille
Chapter 31 Revolution
Chapter 32 An Orléans Conspiracy?
Chapter 33 Return to London
Chapter 34 Lille
Chapter 35 The National Guard
Chapter 36 La Légion Saint-Georges
Chapter 37 Regicide
Chapter 38 The Great Terror
Chapter 39 Too Many Colonels
Chapter 40 Paris 1795
Chapter 41 Saint Domingue
Chapter 42 Coda-Finale
Epilogue
Epitaphs for those who survived Saint-Georges 456
Appendix: Dramatis Personae
Works List
Discography
List of Documents
Bibliography
Index

List of Illustrations

Fig. 1.1 Map of Guadeloupe xix
Fig. 2.1 View of Basse-Terre, ca. 1750 7
Fig. 2.2 ¿Squares¿ of sugar cane, Bailiff 9
Fig. 5.1 Plantation with view on La Suffrière 30
Fig. 7.1 Custom Records of Passengers arriving in Bordeaux, Aug. 2, 1753 41
Fig. 7.2 Port of Bordeaux, 1753 42
Fig. 8.1 Mme. de Pompadour 49
Fig. 8.2 49 rue St. André des Arts today 52
Fig. 10.1 The Saint-Georges Guard 70
Fig. 11.1 Equestrian statue of Louis XV 79
Fig. 11.2 Chamber music at a musical salon 88
Fig. 12.1 ¿Winter¿ from Les quatre saisons 94
Fig. 12.2 The Italian style of fencing 95
Fig. 13.1 One of Les vingt-quatre violons du Roi 99
Fig. 13.2 Leopold Mozart and his two children 107
Fig. 13.3 English Tea in the Salon of the Four Mirrors 108
Fig. 13.4 Portrait of Saint-Georges at 22 111
Fig. 14.1 François Joseph Gossec 114
Fig. 14.2 L¿Hôtel de Soubise 115
Fig. 15.1 Leopold Mozart, 1756 121
Fig. 15.2 The evolution of the bow 122
Fig. 16.1 Title page of Saint-Georges¿ second set of quartets 130
Fig. 17.1 Maria Antoinette at her spinet in Vienna 145
Fig. 17.2 Christoph Willibald Gluck 147
Fig. 17.3 Marie Antoinette in 1777, Versailles 151
Fig. 18.1 George Polgreen Bridgetower 168
Fig. 19.1 La petit loge at the Opéra in the Palais-Royal 179
Fig. 19.2 Mlle.La Guimard in Le Navigateur 185
Fig. 19.3 Papillon de la Ferté 189
Fig. 20.1 Choderlos de Laclos 195
Fig. 20.2 Théatre Italien in 1777 198
Fig. 21.1 Mme. de Genlis 206
Fig. 21.2 Mme. de Montesson 208
Fig. 21.3 The Duke of Orléans and his son 210
Fig. 23.1 Title page of L¿Amant Anonyme 238
Fig. 24.1 Title page of the D¿Ogny catalogue 246
Fig. 24.2 Saint-Georges¿ quartets listed in the D¿Ogny catalogue 247
Fig. 25.1 Philippe, Duke of Chartres with his family 253
Fig. 26.1 Masonic initiation ceremony 260
Fig. 26.2 The Palais-Royal before its reconstruction 262
Fig. 27.1 ¿Prinny,¿ George, Prince of Wales 277
Fig. 27.2 Philippe, Duke of Orléans 278
Fig. 28.1 Henry Angelo 284
Fig. 28.2 Le Chevalier D¿Éon in his uniform 288
Fig. 28.3 Mlle. La Chevalière D¿Éon in 1783 288
Fig. 28.4 Cartoon of St. George and D¿Éon 293
Fig. 28.5 Fencing match at Carlton House 297
Fig. 29.1 Burning of the Opera House, 1781 307
Fig. 29.2 Palais-Royal after reconstruction 308
Fig. 30.1 Mme. de Genlis as ¿Governor¿ of Philippe¿s children 315
Fig. 30.2 Giovanni Baptista Viotti 317
Fig. 30.3 Louis XVI inaugerating the opening session of the Estates-General 320
Fig. 30.4 Desmoulins haranguing the people 324
Fig. 30.5 Fall of the Bastille
Fig. 31.1 Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliott 327
Fig. 32.1 March of the Paris Poissardes, 1789 334
Fig. 32.2 Cartoon of Lafayette kicking Philippe 340
Fig. 33.1 Mr. Angelo¿s Fencing Academy 342
Fig. 34.1 Session at the Jacobin Club, Paris, 1792 363
Fig. 35.1 General Dillon¿s body being burned in Lille 368
Fig. 36.1 Hussar of the Légion St. Georges 374
Fig. 36.2 The battle of Jemappes, 1792 378
Fig. 36.3 Trooper of the 13th regiment of the Chasseurs à cheval, 1793 383
Fig. 37.1 Execution of Louis XVI, 1793 386
Fig. 37.2 Bust of General Dumouriez 388
Fig. 37.3 Arrest of the Commissioners and the Minister of War by Dumourez 397
Fig. 38.1 General Thomas Alexandre Dumas 403
Fig. 38.2 Danton on his way to the guillotine 409
Fig. 38.3 The Feast of the Supreme Being 410
Fig. 38.4 ¿The Last Tumbrel¿ 411
Fig. 40.1 Invasion of the Assembly by the Sans-Culottes 428
Fig. 40.2 Post-Thermadorian manners, 1795 432
Fig. 40.3 Theresa Tallien ¿Our Lady of Thermador¿
Fig. 41.1 Toussaint Louverture, c.1800 444
Fig. 41.2 Map of Saint-Domingue 445

Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference

Berg Publishers
September 2007
224 pages, bibliog., index
Paperback ISBN: 9781845202439
Hardback ISBN: 9781845202422
Ebook ISBN: 9781847883438

Mica Nava, Professor of Cultural Studies
University of East London

Cultural theorist Mica Nava makes an original and significant contribution to the study of cosmopolitanism by exploring everyday English urban cosmopolitanism and foregrounding the gendered, imaginative and empathetic aspects of positive engagement with cultural and racial difference.

By looking at a wide range of texts, events and biographical narratives, she traces cosmopolitanism from its marginal status at the beginning of the twentieth century to its relative normalisation today. Case studies include the promotion of cosmopolitanism by Selfridges before the first world war; relationships between white English women and ‘other’ men—Jews and black GIs—during the 1930s and 1940s; literary, cinematic and social science representations of migrants in postcolonial Britain; and Diana and Dodi’s interracial romance in the 1990s. In the final chapter, the author draws on her own complex family history to illustrate the contemporary cosmopolitan London experience.

Scholars have tended to ignore the oppositional cultures of antiracism and social inclusivity. This groundbreaking study redresses this imbalance and offers a sophisticated account of the uneven history of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Table of Contents

List of figures
Acknowledgements

I. INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 – Cosmopolitanism, Everyday Culture and Structures of Feeling: The Intellectual Framework of the Book

II. COSMOPOLITANISM AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE 1910s-1920s
Chapter 2 – The Allure of Difference: Selfridges, the Russian Ballet and the Tango
Chapter 3 – ‘The Big Shop Controversy’: Ideological Communities and the Chesterton-Selfridge Dispute

III. DIFFERENCE AND DESIRE IN 1930s-1940s
Chapter 4 – The Unconscious and Others: Inclusivity, Jews and the Eroticisation of Difference
Chapter 5 – White Women and Black Men: The Negro as Signifier of Modernity in Wartime Britain

IV. COSMOPOLITANISM IN POSTCOLONIAL BRITAIN
Chapter 6 – Thinking Internationally, Thinking Sexually: Race in Postwar Fiction, Film and Social Science
Chapter 7 – Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed: Romance, Race and the Reconfiguration of the Nation

V. CONCLUSION: ACTUALLY EXISTING COSMOPOLITANISM
Chapter 8 – A Love Song to our Mongrel Selves: Cosmopolitan Habitus and the Ordinariness of Difference

Bibliography
Index

Pearl’s Secret: A Black Man’s Search for His White Family

University of California Press
May 2001
Paperback ISBN: 9780520227309
321 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 25 b/w photographs, 2 line illustrations

Neil Henry, Associate Professor of Journalism
University of California, Berkeley

Pearl’s Secret is a remarkable autobiography and family story that combines elements of history, investigative reporting, and personal narrative in a riveting, true-to-life mystery. In it, Neil Henry—a black professor of journalism and former award-winning correspondent for the Washington Post—sets out to piece together the murky details of his family’s past. His search for the white branch of his family becomes a deeply personal odyssey, one in which Henry deploys all of his journalistic skills to uncover the paper trail that leads to blood relations who have lived for more than a century on the opposite side of the color line. At the same time Henry gives a powerful and vivid account of his black family’s rise to success over the twentieth century. Throughout the course of this gripping story the author reflects on the part that racism and racial ignorance have played in his daily life—from his boyhood in largely white Seattle to his current role as a parent and educator in California.

The contemporary debate over the significance of Thomas Jefferson‘s longtime romantic relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and recent DNA evidence that points to his role as the father of black descendants, have revealed the importance and volatility of the issue of dual-race legacies in American society. As Henry uncovers the dramatic history of his great-great-grandfather—a white English immigrant who fought as a Confederate officer in the Civil War, found success during Reconstruction as a Louisiana plantation owner, and enjoyed a long love affair with Henry’s great-great-grandmother, a freed black slave—he grapples with an unsettling ambivalence about what he is trying to do. His straightforward, honest voice conveys both the pain and the exhilaration that his revelations bring him about himself, his family, and our society. In the book’s stunning climax, the author finally meets his white kin, hears their own remarkable story of survival in America, and discovers a great deal about both the sting of racial prejudice as it is woven into the fabric of the nation, and his own proud identity as a teacher, father, and black American.

A Place to Be Someone: Growing Up with Charles Gordone

Texas Tech University Press
September 2008
272 pages
35 B/W photos
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-89672-635-2

Shirley Gordon Jackson

with introduction by

Maceo C. Dailey, Jr., Professor of African American Studies
University of Texas El Paso

The enlightening memoir of one  multiethnic family’s struggles and triumphs.

Before playwright Charles Gordone (1925–1995) became a Texan, he became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for No Place to Be Somebody, in 1970. His search for a home in the West led him in 1987 to Texas A&M University, where he taught playwriting for the last nine years of his life, and to an influential role in the Cowboy Renaissance of the 1990s. Much as Mary Austin saw the West as a place without gender, Gordone regarded Texas as a place without race, where the need for neighborly connections to survive outweighed discriminatory urges.

A Place to Be Someone covers the years prior to this geographical and psychological journey, the childhood and youth that deeply informed Gordone’s pilgrimage. Growing up in Elkhart, Indiana, a “free” northern town, Charles Gordon and his family never fit completely into commonly understood racial categories. Elkhart and the world labeled them “black,” ignoring the rest of their multiracial and multiethnic heritage. Their familial experiences shaped not only their identities but also their perceptions.

For Gordone, childhood was the beginning of a lifelong battle against labels, and this memoir shows many of the reasons why. Written by his younger sister Shirley, who recognized that her brother had spent his whole life coming “home” to Texas, this revealing family memoir will be welcomed by Gordone scholars and those in African American drama and literature, American studies, women’s studies, and history and by any reader young or old who seeks to understand the forces and consequences of discrimination and mental and physical abuse. The sole surviving sibling, Shirley Gordon Jackson tells this story with the intimacy and immediacy it demands.

Born in 1929 and raised in Elkhart, Indiana, Shirley Gordon Jackson is the fourth of five siblings. Upon graduation from Elkhart Senior High School, Jackson completed her education at Century College of Medical Technology in Chicago, Illinois, on a scholarship. An accomplished pianist and organist, she is also an artist, poet, and writer. After residing in California for some forty-five years, she now calls North Texas home.

Self-made women in a (racist) man’s world: The ‘tragic’ lives of Nella Larsen and Bessie Head

English Academy Review
Volume 25, Issue 1 (May 2008)
pages 66-76
DOI: 10.1080/10131750802099490

Diana Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

(Her research aims to situate mixed race studies in a relatively unexplored sub-Saharan African context.)

Nella Larsen, the ‘mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance,’ and Bessie Head, the famous ‘woman alone,’ are known for their ambiguous origins and their fabrication of personal ‘facts.’This article argues that these mixed race female writers, born under Jim Crow and apartheid respectively, carved out niches in these segregationist societies through the art of self-invention. Because of their precarious positions as ‘mulattas’ in anti-miscegenation worlds, clear parallels are identifiable between Larsen and Head, such as the creation of multiple selves and the realisation of the ‘tragic mulatto‘ stereotype through such characters as Helga Crane in Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Elizabeth in Head’s A Question of Power (1973). The representation of the ‘mulatto’ as a tragic figure caught between races is primarily an American literary trope, but both Larsen and the African-born Head evoke this stereotype in their personal and written stories. These two writers also resist labelling, however, by inventing new identities through pseudonyms, autobiographical heroines, and imagined ‘truths.’ This article examines the overt parallels between two mixed race women writers from different generations and continents, initiating crucial dialogue about the development of racial stigmas across cultures and temporalities.

Read or purchase the article here.

George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life

Louisiana State University Press
2001
471
Trim: 6 x 9
cloth ISBN: 978-0-8071-2586-1

Benjamin R. Justesen

Although he was one of the most important African American political leaders during the last decade of the nineteenth century, George Henry White has been one of the least remembered. A North Carolina representative from 1897 to 1901, White was the last man of his race to serve in the Congress during the post-Reconstruction period, and his departure left a void that would go unfilled for nearly thirty years. At once the most acclaimed and reviled symbol of the freed slaves whose cause he heralded, White remains today largely a footnote to history. In this exhaustively researched biography, Benjamin R. Justesen rescues from obscurity the fascinating story of this compelling figure’s life and accomplishments.

The mixed-race son of a free turpentine farmer, White became a teacher, lawyer, and prosecutor in rural North Carolina. From these modest beginnings he rose in 1896 to become the only black member of the House of Representatives and perhaps the most nationally visible African American politician of his time. White was outspoken in his challenge to racial injustice, but, as Justesen shows, he was no militant racial extremist as antagonistic white democrats charged. His plea was always for simple justice in a nation whose democratic principles he passionately loved. A conservative by philosophy, he was a dedicated Republican to the end. After he retired from Congress, he remained active in the fight against racial discrimination, working with national leaders of both races, from Booker T. Washington to the founders of the NAACP.

Through judicious use of public documents, White’s speeches, newspapers, letters, and secondary sources, Justesen creates an authoritative and balanced portrait of this complex man and proves him to be a much more effective leader than previously believed.