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David T. Ballantyne

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2025 David T. Ballantyne

David T. Ballantyne is a senior lecturer in American history at Keele University and the author of New Politics in the Old South: Ernest F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era.

Schedule

1:00 pm to 1:45 pm
State Library, Third Floor
Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana

2:00 pm to 2:45 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana

David T. Ballantyne’s Fractured Freedoms is a riveting history of central Louisiana from the 1860s to the 1890s, focusing on majority-Black Rapides Parish during Reconstruction. Using the region as a case study, Ballantyne reveals what is, in part, a rural Reconstruction success story, emphasizing the resilience of Black politics and the persistence of significant divisions among white residents that allowed the Republican Party to gain and maintain power there. It was only with the collapse of state-level Republican power in 1877 that Democratic forces in the parish were able to dismantle local Republican political control and gradually constrict Black freedoms.