White Man's Heaven

<div>Drawing on court records newspaper accounts penitentiary records letters and diaries <i>White Man's Heaven</i> is a thorough investigation into the lynching and expulsion of African Americans in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kimberly Harper explores events in the towns of Monett Pierce City Joplin and Springfield Missouri and Harrison Arkansas to show how post-Civil War vigilantism an established tradition of extralegal violence and the rapid political economic and social change of the New South era happened independently but were also part of a larger interconnected regional experience. Even though some whites especially in Joplin and Springfield 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.</div>