American Rambler With Colin Woodward

John C. Rodrigue returns! John is a professor of history at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, where he has been since 2007. He was one of Colin's professors at LSU when they were both in Baton Rouge in the early 2000s. John's new book is Freedom's Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Cambridge University Press). It's John's third book. Influenced by everything from Eugene Genovese to Timothy Snyder's book on Eastern Europe, Bloodlands, Freedom's Crescent looks at the process whereby the Union went from freeing (some) slaves via the Emancipation Proclamation to the eradication of slavery through the 13th Amendment. As John makes clear, it was a complicated and frustrating process. Building on work of Armstead Robinson, James Oakes, and Michael Vorenberg, John provides a detailed look at how Union commanders and politicians grappled with thorny military, political, and constitutional issues in the western theater of operations. Historians have written many bo