Daniel Rasmussen: American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt

Harvard Magazine recently wrote:

DANIEL RASMUSSEN ’09 found his senior thesis topic where the history books left off: scattered but brief references to a slave rebellion in New Orleans in 1811 piqued his interest junior year. When the history and literature concentrator realized that, with a militia of some 500 black slaves, this was the single largest and most tactically sophisticated slave revolt in American history, and that not only this fact, but the event itself, had gone largely unexamined, he knew he had his topic. The thesis went on to win a Hoopes Prize for excellence in undergraduate research, but Rasmussen wanted to make sure that the story had readers beyond the prize committee. “This is a story that needs to be told,” he says. “This is a tremendously important moment in American history, and a very important moment in African-American history. It undermines our understanding of slavery as depressing, and of the slaves as victims. These slaves were heroes.” Since graduation, Rasmussen has been working as an analyst at a private equity firm in the Boston area and devoting his free time to expanding his thesis into a book. The result, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt, will be published by HarperCollins in January.

Read that full article, here. Check the accompanying blog out as well (good beginning sources for scholars).

"Jindal Speaks About New Book" from KTBS

KTBS in Louisiana reports the following:

In his book, "Leadership and Crisis," Governor Bobby Jindal [Republican] doesn't mince words when it comes to the federal government's response to the BP oil spill, calling it "lackadaisical almost from the start." He blames the lack of boom needed to protect Louisiana's shoreline on rigid rules and regulations, and the government's refusal to relax requirements even in time of crisis. Jindal says it was reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina. It was contentious from the start. Government officials, he says, were more worried about procedure than outcomes. He points to the moratorium on all gulf drilling as an example. Estimates are the moratorium has cost Louisiana between 8,000 - 12,000 jobs. The economic impact of that is still out; but the governor says some of the rigs rented for up to half-a-million dollars a day, rents that included taxes to the state.

See the local news page here. Meanwhile, the governor's facing a long-shot recall prospect, spearheaded by Ronnie Caesar, a Ph.D student in public policy at a university in Louisiana. KTBS reports: "With less than a year until the next governor's race, a petition has been filed to recall Governor Bobby Jindal. The petitioner, Ronnie Ceasar of Opelousas, filed the documents Wednesday afternoon with the Secretary of State's Office. Ceasar says he's fed up with cuts to Louisiana's higher education and health care. "Has anyone done an impact study to see what these cuts are going to do to the poor, the disenfranchised," said Ceasar." See the KTBS webpage on this story, here. User-reader comments on the page are interesting to foreigners of Louisiana. The other day, a State Representative Damon Baldone [Democrat] published a letter in a New York newspaper, while Jindal was there fundraising and promoting a book. The Representative said this: “We haven’t seen much of Jindal back home [...] First, he spent months jetting around the country campaigning for other politicians. Now, he’s back on the road promoting his book and raising money. ... Clearly, personal political aspirations are more important to him than the reality we face here in Louisiana. Our people are facing the largest budget deficits in recent memory — a crisis measured in the billions, not just the hundreds of millions.” See the news story on this issue here. See also: Bobby Jindal: The Transformational Story of a Brown-skinned, Die-hard Conservative in the Deep South, Bobby Jindal