Book description
At sixteen, Jesse James began his fighting career by killing Unionist
neighbours on their doorsteps. In the bloodshed and bitterness that
followed the South's surrender at Appomattox, Jesse and his fellow
guerillas, with their gunfights and hold-ups, became part of the
intensely brutal struggle by the White South against the racial
egalitarianism and Federal power fostered by Reconstruction.
In the first serious biography of Jesse James in forty years, T. J.
Stiles paints a strikingly new and vivid portrait of the period before
the American Civil War, during the conflict and its aftermath. With
groundbreaking scholarship and dazzling reinterpretation, T. J. Stiles
has refashioned one of the great legends of American history.
T. J. Stiles studied history at Carleton College and Columbia
University, where he was awarded a President's Fellowship. He has
written about American history for Smithsonian and the Los Angeles
Times, and is the editor of a five-volume series of anthologies of
primary sources. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
