By Tony Horwitz
SPYING ON
THE SOUTH
AN ODYSSEY ACROSS THE AMERICAN DIVIDE
The best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America’s greatest landscape architect.
In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times.
For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name “Yeoman,” the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners—white and black, free and enslaved, rich and poor—were revelatory for readers of his day and have endured as classic texts for the study of America on the brink of cataclysmic break-up…
News & Events
Remembering Pulitzer-winning journalist and author Tony Horwitz
Pulitzer-winning journalist and author Tony Horwitz has died. Best known for the book “Confederates in the Attic,” a look at modern-day southern attitudes about the Civil War and its reenactors, Horwitz also covered global conflicts for The Wall Street Journal....
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Can Bar-Stool Democracy Save America?
Originally published in The New York Times, April 27, 2019 Last week I saw my cardiologist. He told me I drink too much. This wasn’t a shock. I live on Martha’s Vineyard, by the wine-dark sea, where drink animates the bleak winter months — and lays down a base for the...
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Publisher’s Weekly Review: Spying on the South
Originally published in Publisher's Weekly, April 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic) follows the trail of Frederick Law Olmsted, 19th-century reporter and legendary landscape architect, across the American South in this...
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Midnight Rising
Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war.
Confederates in the Attic
When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he’s put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again, this time from a war close to home and to his own heart.
Blue Latitudes
Two centuries after James Cook’s epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to recapture the Captain’s adventures and explore his embattled legacy in today’s Pacific.
Tony Horwitz’s reporting is fearless and persistent and inspired—and it produces views of America like no one else’s. Spying on the South kept me turning the pages to see what frightening and funny revelation was coming next. An important book for our almost unprecedented moment in history.