St Petersburg Press
Days of Fear: A Lynching in St. Petersburg
Key Metrics
- Jon Wilson
- St Petersburg Press
- Paperback
- 9781940300733
- 9 X 6 X 0.22 inches
- 0.32 pounds
- History > African American & Black
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Days of Fear exposes the shocking story of a gruesome 1914 murder in St. Petersburg, Florida and the calculated lynching of the Black man accused. Who killed Frank Sherman with a shotgun blast inches from his head? What in the restless photographer's life led to his bloody end? And why
did powerful men decide John Evans had to die for the crime? This book explores true-crime events buried for decades. It tells of the friendless Evans torn from his jail cell, marched down the main street, strung by his neck from a pole, and riddled with gunfire from men, women, and children. It suggests that someone close to Sherman killed him, igniting three days of brutality in a town that cherished its reputation as a placid and profitable resort. Days of Fear describes in detail St. Petersburg as it existed more than a century ago - a growing waterfront community particularly comfortable for white people but often difficult for Black people. It tells a grim story the authors hope is relevant to the twenty-first century's periodic mob violence and domestic terrorism.
Author Bio
Jon Wilson joined the department in 1999 as Lecturer in British Imperial and South Asian History. He was awarded a DPhil from Oxford University in 2000, following two years in New York studying for an MA in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. He was Deputy Head (External Relations) of the School of Arts and Humanities from 2008-11, where he initiated the King’s Arts and Humanities festival. He has also worked as a parliamentary researcher and been a local councillor.
Research Interests
Prof Wilson’s work focuses on the everyday life of the state in South Asia, Britain and beyond. His first book, The Dominance of Strangers was a study of the emergence of a modern regime in Bengal during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His second major project was on the British conquest of India and its implications for imperial and Indian politics. India Conquered. Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, published by Simon and Schuster (or Public Affairs in the USA/Canada) was published in September 2016, and was shortlisted for the Longman-History Today prize.
Prof Wilson is currently working on a multi-national history of everyday concepts of government from the 1945 to the present, tracing particularly the rise and fall of ideas of national and democratic political power after the Second World War and end of empire. The project will result in a book whose provisional title is Out of Chaos. A Global History of the Rise and Fall of the Nation State. Part of it involves quantitative textual analysis, and is part of a collaborative project with colleagues in Digital Humanities and the Turing Institute developing digital methodologies for understanding global conceptual change.
Source: King's College of London
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