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One of Janet Maslin's Favorite Books of 2018, The New York TimesOne of John Warner's Favorite Books of 2018, Chicago TribuneNamed one of the “Best Civil War Books of 2018” by the Civil War Monitor“A fascinating and important new historical study.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times“A stunning contribution to the historiography of Civil War memory studies.”—Civil War Times The stunning, groundbreaking account of'the ways in which our nation has tried to come to grips with its original sin'(Providence Journal) Hailed by the New York Times as a'fascinating and important new historical study that examines... the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most,'Denmark Vesey's Garden'maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country'(The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822. As they examine public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions,'Kytle and Roberts's combination of encyclopedic knowledge of Charleston's history and empathy with its inhabitants'past and present struggles make them ideal guides to this troubled history'(Publishers Weekly, starred review). A work the Civil War Times called'a stunning contribution,'Denmark Vesey's Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America's deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery's enduring legacy in the United States.

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife. Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.