Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835

基本信息出版社:Nan A. Talese (2012年7月3日)精装:352页正文语种:英语ISBN:0385533373条形码:9780385533379商品重量:730 gASIN:0385533373您想告诉我们您发现了更低的价格?

商品描述内容简介The unexpected story of how the early struggle against slavery violently erupted in Washington City, pitting the famous and ambitious District Attorney Francis Scott Key in a uniquely American battle for justice.

 In 1835, the city of Washington pulsed with change. As newly freed African Americans from the South poured in, free blacks outnumbered slaves for the first time. Radical ideas of abolishing slavery circulated on the city's streets, and white residents were forced to confront new ideas of what the nation's future might look like.

 On the night of August 4th, Arthur Bowen, an eighteen-year-old slave, stumbled into the bedroom where his owner, Anna Thornton, slept. He had an ax in the crook of his arm. An alarm was raised, and he ran away. Word of the incident spread rapidly, and within days, Washington's first race riot exploded, as whites fearing a slave rebellion attacked the property of the free blacks. Residents dubbed the event the “Snow-Storm," in reference to the central role of Beverly Snow, a flamboyant former slave turned successful restaurateur, who became the target of the mob's rage.

In the wake of the riot came two sensational criminal trials that gripped the city. Prosecuting both cases was none other than Francis Scott Key, a politically ambitious attorney famous for writing the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” who few now remember served as the city's district attorney for eight years. Key defended slavery until the twilight's last gleaming, and pandered to racial fears by seeking capital punishment for Arthur Bowen. But in a surprise twist his prosecution was thwarted by Arthur's ostensible victim, Anna Thornton, a respected socialite whose deceased husband had designed the U.S. Capitol and who may well have been Arthur's father.

Ranging beyond the familiar confines of the White House and the Capitol,Snow-Storm in August delivers readers into the bustling and treacherous streets of Washington City with a textured and absorbing account of the racial secrets and contradictions that coursed beneath the freewheeling capital of a rising world power.

媒体推荐"Snow-Storm in Augustis the sort of book I most love to read, history so fresh it feels alive, yet introducing me to a time and place that I had little known or utterly misunderstood. After reading Jeff Morley's vibrant account, one can never hear 'The Star-Spangled Banner' the same way again."

—David Maraniss, author ofBarack Obama: The Story

"Jefferson Morley has vividly and factually recreated a largely lost but pivotal time in Jacksonian Washington, an emerging, still somewhat primitive capital city, where racial tensions among its complex mix of white, free black, and enslaved residents inevitably lead to violence and push the debate over abolition into the houses of Congress and the President. The historical characters, famous and forgotten, come to life in affecting and surprising ways without fictional artifice, a tribute to Morley's meticulous research and empathetic narrative style."

—Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor ofThe Washington Post