Books by John David Smith

William Hannibal Thomas (1843-1935) served with distinction in the U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War (in which he lost an arm) and was a preacher, teacher, lawyer, state legislator, and journalist following Appomattox. In many publications up through the 1890s, Thomas espoused a critical though optimistic black nationalist ideology. After his mid-twenties, however, Thomas began exhibiting a self-destructive personality, one that kept him in constant trouble with authorities and always on the run. His book The American Negro (1901) was his final self-destructive act.Attacking African Americans in gross and insulting language in this utterly pessimistic book, Thomas blamed them for the contemporary "e;Negro problem"e; and argued that the race required radical redemption based on improved "e;character,"e; not changed "e;color."e; Vague in his recommendations, Thomas implied that blacks should model themselves after certain mulattoes, most notably William Hannibal Thomas.Black Judas is a biography of Thomas, a publishing history of The American Negro, and an analysis of that books significance to American racial thought. The book is based on fifteen years of research, including research in postamputation trauma and psychoanalytic theory on selfhatred, to assess Thomass metamorphosis from a constructive race critic to a black Negrophobe. John David Smith argues that his radical shift resulted from key emotional and physical traumas that mirrored Thomass life history of exposure to white racism and intense physical pain.

This early work by the esteemed historian Charles P. Roland draws from an abundance of primary sources to describe how the Civil War brought south Louisiana's sugarcane industry to the brink of extinction, and disaster to the lives of civilians both black and white.

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Details the slavery debate from the Civil War through World War I. This title argues that African American slavery remained a salient metaphor for how Americans interpreted contemporary race relations decades after the Civil War. It draws on postwar articles, books, diaries, manuscripts, newspapers, and speeches.

These essays introduce the complexities of researching and analyzing "race". This book focuses on problems confronted while researching, writing and interpreting race and slavery, such as conflict between ideological perspectives, and changing interpretations of the questions.

?An Old Creed for the New South is a most thoughtful study of the emerging interpretations of antebellum slavery in the immediate post-Civil War period and in the historical literature in the first half-century after emancipation. The analysis of the major (and minor) historians who helped shape the historical study of slavery--from Holst to Philips--shows the relationships among the uncovering of new sources, the asking of particular questions, and the beliefs of individual scholars. Based upon extensive research in a wide variety of sources, John David Smith has demonstrated how post-Civil War descriptions of the slave experience by southerners and northerners, by blacks and whites reflected (and, in turn, influenced) contemporary concerns about southern and racial issues. Smith's examination of the writings of contemporaries and historians is an important contribution to the study of slavery and emancipation, as well as a major work of historiographic analysis.?-Stanley L. Engerman, Professor of Economics and History, University of Rochester