September 25, 2006

UM Professor's Book Published

John Forsyth, longtime editor of the Press-Register, formerly the Mobile Register, is the subject of “The Pen Makes a Good Sword: John Forsyth of the Mobile Register,” a new biography authored by Dr. Lonnie Burnett, associate professor of history at the University of Mobile.

Burnett said it was his acute, lifelong interest in newspapers that eventually led to his discovery of Forsyth, whom he refers to in the book’s introduction as “one of the South’s most outstanding journalistic stalwarts.”

“When I was working on my Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi, I wanted to do my research on newspapers during the Civil War and Reconstruction. I kept finding references to John Forsyth of the Mobile Register,” said Burnett. “I realized that he was a very important figure that no one had ever written a full-length book about.”

The book documents Forsyth’s career as a southern newspaper editor during the antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Burnett highlights the connections between Forsyth’s work as a journalist and a politician, examining the development of Alabama’s two-party system in the 1830s and 1840s, and exploring the reasoning that led southern unionists like Forsyth to support secession after Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election.

Burnett traveled extensively doing research for the book, from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to the University of Georgia. He also used local resources, including material from the Mobile Municipal Archives and the Caldwell Delaney collection in the University of Mobile’s J.L. Bedsole Library.

Burnett is currently working on a second book about Henry Hotze, a Confederate propaganda agent to Europe from Mobile. He is also writing two articles for the Encyclopedia of Alabama History, on John Forsyth and Henry Hotze.

“The Pen Makes a Good Sword” is published by the University of Alabama Press and will be available in October in local bookstores and online, both on the publisher’s website at uapress.ua.edu, and at www.amazon.com.