With Free State of Jones, Hollywood’s Civil War Comes Closer to History’s
By Victoria Bynum, published for Zocalo Public Square
The setting is the piney woods of Civil War Jones County, Mississippi. The white farmer Newt Knight leads a band of deserters against Confederate forces. An enslaved woman, Rachel, lends invaluable aid to this Knight Band. After gaining her freedom, she spends the rest of her life as Newt’s partner. These events are a great story—and even better history. This summer, Free State of Jones will bring to movie theaters across the country a thrilling and relatively unknown tale of Civil War insurrection, romance, and interracial collaboration. The film, inspired by several historical books about these events including my own, shows how far scholarly research—and popular entertainment—about the Civil War has come. Free State of Jones is a Civil War movie that privileges neither Gods and Generals nor genteel plantations à la Gone with the Wind. White yeoman farmers represented a class disproportionately devastated by battlefield deaths and Confederate seizures of home front produce and property. As they increasingly desert …
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Renegade South 
Vikki–Love the movie and so glad your work is getting such a wide audience. I’m trying to reach you to see if you might have time to participate in a conversation about your work, the movie and how its themes resonate today, with National Park Service history practitioners. Can we be in touch? Thanks.
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Fabulous movie, I look forward to your book, I live in the Great Dismal Swamp in VA, I’m reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book on the subject.
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Hi, I just saw an article in the LA Review of Books about the Birth of a Nation film, discussing historical aspects of the film as well as the issues of Nate Parker. But it also contains comments about the film Free State of Jones – interesting ones. I thought you might like to read this.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-we-dont-need-another-hero-film-nate-parkers-the-birth-of-a-nation/#!
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Thanks, Kerry! Yes, there’s great commentary on The Free State of Jones movie in this review of Birth of a Nation. It also approvingly cites Cedric Johnson’s review of FSOJ, which in my opinion is one of the most insightful.
Vikki
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