The Ballad of Robert Charles
Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900
By K. Stephen Prince
264 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 15 halftones, 8 maps, 3 tables, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6182-7
Published: March 2021 -
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-6183-4
Published: February 2021 -
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5565-7
Published: February 2021 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6181-0
Published: March 2021
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- Paperback $27.95
- Hardcover $95.00
- E-Book $22.99
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Awards & distinctions
2021 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association
2022 President's Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Finalist, 2022 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize
In this fascinating work, K. Stephen Prince sheds fresh light on both the history of the Robert Charles riots and the practice of history-writing itself. He reveals evidence of intentional erasures, both in the ways the riot and its aftermath were chronicled and in the ways stories were silenced or purposefully obscured. But Prince also excavates long-hidden facts from the narratives passed down by white and black New Orleanians over more than a century. In so doing, he probes the possibilities and limitations of the historical imagination.
About the Author
K. Stephen Prince is an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida. He is also author of Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915.
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Reviews
"A well-told and imaginative work of history that should inform the study of racial violence and the American South for years to come . . . . In addition to writing the definitive history of the 1900 New Orleans Riot, Prince brilliantly pinpoints the ways in which a riot and its repercussions continued to shape race relations in New Orleans and the United States for more than a century."—David Godshalk, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
"The Ballad of Robert Charles is something new; it forces its reader to reexamine the role of geography, memory, and silence in the project of writing the histories of populations muted by poverty and racism. And for that this work is not only interesting. It is vital."—Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
"[Prince’s] study of Robert Charles and the social upheaval attached to his name opens new directions for American and southern historians of police power and Black rebellion. . . . Readers will find few heroes or villains in his account, and fewer injunctions. Instead, The Ballad of Robert Charles seeks to understand the manifold violence necessary to maintain white supremacy in America."—Agricultural History
"A powerful, eloquent meditation on what it means to do history, on how the combination of racism, evidentiary silences, and memory conspire to obscure our understanding of the past."—Journal of American History
"The Ballad of Robert Charles tackles a challenging, yet timely, topic. . . . This engaging book reminds us that even in the silences there are lessons to be learned from the past, if we know how to listen."—64 Parishes
"Visions in a Seer Stone raises the house lights and illuminates the stage in a way that will hopefully inspire further work into the conditions under which the Book of Mormon came into existence."—Journal of the Book of Mormon
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