University of Arkansas Press Publishes Paperback of White Man’s Heaven

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has published a paperback edition of White Man’s Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894--1909 ($21.95), by Kimberly Harper. Harper, who lives in the Missouri Ozarks, developed White Man’s Heaven from her master’s thesis in history at the University of Arkansas.

The original cloth edition of the book, published in 2010, has been very successful for the press, selling out its original print run and garnering positive reviews in the Journal of Southern History, Journal of American History, Missouri Historical Review, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, American Historical Review, and others. The book also received a Missouri Humanities Award for distinguished achievement in literature.

White Man’s Heaven investigates the lynching and expulsion of African Americans in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Harper shows how an established tradition of extralegal violence and the rapid political, economic, and social change of the New South era combined to create an environment that resulted in interracial violence. Even though some whites tried to stop the violence and bring the lynchers to justice, many African Americans fled the Ozarks, leaving only a resilient few behind and forever changing the racial composition of the region.

“Kimberly Harper has written a powerful, deeply researched, and persuasive acccount of the driving of entire communities of African Americans from their homes,” said Edward L. Ayers, author of The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. “These stories of the Ozarks speak of a larger tale of violence and subjugation we must understand if we are to undestand the history of this country.”  

Jarod Roll, co-author of The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America, called the book “exquisite story-telling … Harper’s book is an impotant contribution for specialsts in the field, but it is also essential reading for anyone who lives in the southern Ozarks.”

Fitzhugh Brundage, author of Lynching in the New South: Life after Reconstruction, called White Man’s Heaven “an uncommonly sophisticated piece of local history that demonstrates why local / micro history is so valuable.”