William S. McFeely – författare

Strange Career offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws and American race relations. This book presented evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1880s. It's publication in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court ordered schools be desegregated, helped counter arguments that the ruling would destoy a centuries-old way of life. The commemorative edition includes a special afterword by William S. McFeely, former Woodward student and winner of both the 1982 Pulitzer Prize and 1992 Lincoln Prize. As William McFeely describes in the new afterword, 'the slim volume's social consequence far outstripped its importance to academia. The book became part of a revolution...The Civil Rights Movement had changed Woodward's South and his slim, quietly insistent book...had contributed to that change.'

Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative is accompanied by a preface and explanatory footnotes. Included are contemporary perspectives, along with essays, a chronology and bibliography.

At the close of the Civil War, Congress established the Freedmen's Bureau—formally, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—to deal with the question of the place in society of its new black citizens. General Oliver Otis Howard, known both admiringly and derisively as the "Christian General," was given the responsibility of defining the nation's commitment to four million former slaves.Instructed by Congress to divide lands abandoned to the Union army into forty-acre plots and award them to freedmen, Howard began a program that might have given many families farms of their own. The effort had barely begun when it ran into President Andrew Johnson's policy of returning such lands to former white owners. Soon Howard and his agents were under pressure not to assist the free people, but to coerce them into working for landlords.And yet, however tarnished the record, the Bureau was still recalled by W. E. B. DuBois for its "bright promise." Yankee Stepfather provides a revealing, and troubling, picture of the complex relationship of African Americans to their government at a crucial juncture in American history.In a new foreword to this edition, William S. McFeely places his book, first published in 1968, in its place in the scholarship on race relations of the past quarter-century.

Former slave, orator, journalist, autobiographer; revolutionary on behalf of a just America, Frederick Douglass was a towering figure, at once consummately charismatic and flawed. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) galvanized the antislavery movement and is one of the truly seminal works of African-American literature. In this masterful and compelling biography, William S. McFeely captures the many sides of Douglass—his boyhood on the Chesapeake; his self-education; his rebellion and rising expectations; his marriage, affairs, and intense friendships; his bitter defeat and transcendent courage—and recreates the high drama of a turbulent era.

In this moving and original work, William S. McFeely, one of this country's most distinguished historians, retells the history—and enters into the current-day lives—of the people who inhabit Sapelo's Island off the coast of Georgia, descendants of slaves who once worked its huge cotton plantations. It is at once a richly detailed work of historical reconstruction, a sensitive portrait of the lives of black Americans in this particular place and in our own time, and a moving meditation on race by a writer who has made its painful dilemmas his life's work as a historian.

On a misty September morning in rural Georgia, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian found himself cast in a role that he had never imagined for himself: an expert witness in the sentencing trial of a convicted kidnapper, rapist, and murderer. His brief testimony that day would ultimately lead him on a personal journey into the criminal justice system, to confront the actions and decisions of lawyers battling for and against the death penalty, convicts whose lives are at stake, and jurors forced to decide who shall live and who shall die.

The seminal biography of one of America's towering, enigmatic figures. From his boyhood in Ohio to the battlefields of the Civil War and his presidency during the crucial years of Reconstruction, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography traces the entire arc of Grant's life (1822-1885). "A moving and convincing portrait....profound understanding of the man as well as his period and his country."—C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books "Clearsightedness, along with McFeely's unfailing intelligence and his existential sympathy...informs his entire biography."—Justin Kaplan, The New Republic

Thomas Eakins painted two worlds in nineteenth-century America: one sure of its values—statesmen, scientists, and philosophers—and one that offered an uncertain vision of the changing times. From the shadow of his mother's depression to his fraught identity as a married man with homosexual inclinations, to his failure to sell his work in his day, Eakins was a man marked equally by passion and melancholy.In this enlightening examination of Eakins's defining artistic moments and key relationships—with wife Susan MacDowell, with subject and friend Walt Whitman, and with several leading scientists of his time—William S. McFeely sheds light on the motivations and desires of a founder of American realism.

Born into but escaped from slavery, Frederick Douglass—orator, journalist, autobiographer; revolutionary on behalf of a just America—was a towering figure, at once consummately charismatic and flawed. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) galvanised the antislavery movement and is one of the truly seminal works of African-American literature. In this Lincoln Prize– winning biography, William S. McFeely captures the many sides of Douglass— his boyhood on the Chesapeake; his self-education; his rebellion and rising expectations; his marriage, affairs, and intense friendships; his bitter defeat and transcendent courage—and re-creates the high drama of a turbulent era.