An interesting review of Thomas B. Allen’s new book, Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War.

That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am a Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was the only photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett Till, and he was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, Dr. King’s room, on the night he was assassinated…

But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era: He was a paid F.B.I. informer.

It is an all-too-familiar plot: Government-sanctioned big-business vs. farmers. With the price of dark-leaf tobacco spiraling downward, debt-plagued planters of Kentucky’s “Black Patch” region grew increasingly desperate during the early 1900’s. The gigantic American Tobacco Company had achieved unchallenged control over the market, and planters were stuck selling at whatever price the tobacco trust dictated.

Here, though, the story deviates from the script, for the farmers refused to roll over and die…

“The period can aptly be described as America’s adolescence. It was also the Golden Age of the White Republic.”

An interesting review of Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought:The Transformation of America, 1815-1848