President of the LBJ Foundation and award-wining author of Second Acts and The Last Republicans draws on interviews and conversations with seven presidents to identify the essence of character, leadership and legacy that has defined each of them and the modern American presidency.

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In Freedom Season, acclaimed historian, Peniel E. Joseph, offers a stirring narrative history of 1963, marking it as the defining year of the Black freedom struggle—a year when America faced a deluge of political strife and violence and emerged transformed.

Nineteen sixty-three opened with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and ended with America in a state of mourning. The months in between brought waves of racial terror, mass protest, and police repression that shocked the world, inspired radicals and reformers, and forced the hands of moderate legislators. By year’s end the murders of John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and four Black girls at a church in Alabama left the nation determined to imagine a new way forward. Alongside the stories of historical giants like James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph uplifts the perspectives of less celebrated leaders like playwright Lorraine Hansberry and activist Gloria Richardson.

Over one heartbreakingly tumultuous year, America unraveled and remade itself as the world looked on. Freedom Season shows how the upheavals of 1963 planted the seeds for watershed civil rights legislation and renewed hope in the promise and possibility of freedom. 

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About the Author

Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and distinguished service leadership professor and professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and editor of eight award-winning books on African American history, including The Third Reconstruction and The Sword and the Shield. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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Thorns of the Mesquite is set on a cattle and sheep ranch in West Texas in the late 1930’s. World War I has expanded America’s horizons and sense of hegemony in the world; the Depression has taken a terrible toll in rural areas, combined with the great drought and the Dustbowl. The threat of World War II destabilizes throughout. 

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The novel’s main character, Dona Rose Willis, grew up on the ranch, and though her life is circumscribed by the land she loves and customs of her time and place, it is through her and the characters who come into her life that we experience a complex world of racism, sexism, tyranny of religion, devotion to land, forgiveness and love of many kinds. 

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About the Author

I was born and raised in Austin, Texas, and though I moved to New England with my family many years ago, the spirit of the Lone Star State—as they say—has never left me. My early childhood was marked by visits to my grandparents' ranch in West Texas, and the powerful images from that landscape and life have infused my writing for decades.

 

It was while I was leading a writing retreat in Ireland that the seed for Thorns of the Mesquite was planted. An image of my great-aunt Dona, whom I'd met only briefly at age five (but I remember to this day how she called the chickens), appeared to me, walking a dirt road on that very ranch. I was compelled to follow. What resulted, years later, is this novel, a made-up story born of deep personal roots.

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