A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction
by Drew A. Swanson
Recipient of the 2023 North Caroliniana Society Book Award
The North Caroliniana Society established the North Caroliniana Book Award in 2003 to recognize annually “the book that captures the essence of North Carolina by contributing powerfully to an understanding of the state.” Authors are eligible regardless of residency. However, neither authors nor publishers submit books; instead, a committee privately surveys all books published during the year and chooses the volume that it believes “makes a positive contribution and appears to have the best chance of standing the test of time as a classic volume of North Caroliniana.”
~ April 2024
On April 24, 2024, the 2023 North Caroliniana Society Book Award was presented to Drew A. Swanson, author of A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction, during the Annual Membership Meeting and Awards Banquet held in Chapel Hill, NC at The Carolina Inn.
More information about the Annual Membership Meeting and Awards Banquet, including award recipients, can be found in Number 65 of the North Caroliniana Society Imprints, titled A Future for Our Histories by Kevin Cherry.
A video of the day’s festivities is available on the Society’s website.
ABOUT THE BOOK
On May 21, 1870, a party of Ku Klux Klansmen assassinated North Carolina state senator John W. Stephens in the basement of the Caswell County Courthouse during a political rally. For sixty-five years thereafter the perpetrators remained unknown, and the event became one of the state’s most infamous mysteries. The event launched a declaration of martial law, fruitless trials, congressional hearings, discounted confessions, and secretive admissions, along the way involving some of North Carolina’s most influential people, from governors to novelists to historians. The violence and debates were rooted in the intimate details of the rural countryside, Swanson demonstrates, tied to contested ideas about how southern agriculture should proceed in the wake of emancipation. A Man of Bad Reputation traces John Stephens’s life, death, and afterlife in an engaging narrative to explore the embattled process of North Carolina’s Reconstruction, and, through it and its aftermath, the nation’s uneasy grappling with the legacy of the Civil War.
Drew A. Swanson
Drew Swanson is the Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Distinguished Professor of Southern History at Georgia Southern University. Swanson’s award-winning scholarship includes publications in such leading forums as American Historical Review, Environmental History, Agricultural History, and Environment & History, as well as four books on the rural and environmental history of the American South. His current book projects include a study of the consumer culture of American hunting and an environmental history of white-tailed deer. He is active in several scholarly organizations and is past president of the Agricultural History Society as well as incoming editor of the journal Agricultural History.