{"id":12260,"date":"2011-02-23T05:09:37","date_gmt":"2011-02-23T05:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=12260"},"modified":"2016-05-04T01:37:47","modified_gmt":"2016-05-04T01:37:47","slug":"civil-war-fires-up-literary-shootout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=12260","title":{"rendered":"Civil War Fires Up Literary Shootout"},"content":{"rendered":"

Civil War Fires Up Literary Shootout<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times
\n<\/a>2009-07-29<\/p>\n

Michael Cieply<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

LOS ANGELES \u2014 History repeats itself. But sometimes it needs a little polishing up from Hollywood<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Over the last few weeks, the writers of a pair of Civil War<\/a>-era histories about the anti-Confederate<\/a> inhabitants of Jones County, Miss.<\/a>, have been trading barbs in an unusual public spat. It began when the author of one book, rights to which had been sold to Universal Pictures and the filmmaker Gary Ross<\/a>, discovered that Mr. Ross had spurred the publication of a new and somewhat sexier work on the same subject.<\/p>\n

The encounter has created unexpected bad blood over incidents that occurred\u2014or not\u2014more than 100 years ago. And it offers a glimpse of the way that show business and its values have become entwined with the academic book world and its decision-making process.<\/p>\n

On June 23 Doubleday published \u201cThe State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy<\/a>,\u201d a narrative history by the Harvard scholar John Stauffer<\/a> and the Washington Post<\/em> writer Sally Jenkins<\/a>. The book, which on Monday was ranked No. 83 on Amazon\u2019s best-seller list, presented Newton Knight<\/a>, the leader of the renegade county, as a morally driven hero in the mold of John Brown<\/a>\u2014but whose appeal was enhanced by his romance with an ex-slave who, in the book\u2019s account, became the love of his life as relations with his white wife cooled.<\/p>\n

In the book\u2019s acknowledgments, the authors thanked Mr. Ross, who they said had brought the idea to their editor, Phyllis Grann at Doubleday, and whose screenplay had served as \u201cour impetus and our inspiration.\u201d<\/p>\n

This all came as a surprise to Victoria Bynum<\/a>, a history professor at Texas State University, San Marcos. Her own book on the subject\u2014\u201cThe Free State of Jones: Mississippi\u2019s Longest Civil War<\/a>\u201d\u2014had been published eight years earlier by the University of North Carolina Press<\/em>, which sold the film rights to Universal as material for Mr. Ross\u2019s project in 2007…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Civil War Fires Up Literary Shootout The New York Times 2009-07-29 Michael Cieply LOS ANGELES \u2014 History repeats itself. But sometimes it needs a little polishing up from Hollywood. Over the last few weeks, the writers of a pair of Civil War-era histories about the anti-Confederate inhabitants of Jones County, Miss., have been trading barbs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,459,8,1459,6940,20],"tags":[5505,5506,3883,5508,20762,1456,5507,2327,1453,1454],"class_list":["post-12260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-history","category-media-archive","category-mississippi","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-gary-ross","tag-john-stauffer","tag-jones-county","tag-michael-cieply","tag-mississippi","tag-newton-knight","tag-sally-jenkins","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-victoria-bynum","tag-victoria-e-bynum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12260"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46848,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12260\/revisions\/46848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}