Edward ball author books

Edward Ball

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Edward Ball is a nonfiction writer who has published five books of history and biography, including Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), an account of his family’s 170-year history as slaveholders in South Carolina. Ball is interested in the place of history and memory in the lives of ordinary people. Since 2010, he has taught nonfiction writing, part-time, at Yale University.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Ball is investigating the life of a fighter in the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana, a member of Ball’s own family, examining the role of a participant in the race terror that spread through the South after the end of the Civil War, during Reconstruction. The book he is writing is outwardly the biography of a plain Southerner, a person neither distinguished nor well documented, while it is also an attempt to explore the roots of white supremacy. 

Winner of a National Book Award for Slaves in the Family, Ball has written two books that reached the New York Times Best Sellers list. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and a grant from the Public Scholar Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures (Doubleday, 2013)—a story of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1880s California—is in development as a television miniseries.

  • A Family History in White
  • Edward Ball is an American author
  • Books by Edward Ball

    Slaves in the Family
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    4.03 avg rating — 2,985 ratings — published 1998 — 30 editions
    The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures
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    3.24 avg rating — 1,493 ratings — published 2012 — 9 editions
    Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy
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    3.76 avg rating — 963 ratings — published 2020 — 6 editions
    The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the Segregated South
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    4.03 avg rating — 153 ratings — published 2001 — 8 editions
    Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love
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    3.39 avg rating — 180 ratings — published 2004 — 12 editions
    The Genetic Strand: Exploring a Family History Through DNA
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    3.09 avg rating — 158 ratings — published 2007 — 9 editions
    The Sweet Hell Inside
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    4.28 avg rating — 18 ratings — published 2001
    Gretsch 6120: The History of a Legendary Guitar
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    4.31 avg rating — 13 ratings — published 2010 — 2 editions
    Ball's Manual of Gretsch Guitars: 1950s
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    it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2014 — 3 editions
    What I Learned in the Streets & Prison: That Can Help You Win at the Game of Life
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    it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2013
    In Search of True Wisdom: Essays in Old Testament Interpretation in Honour of Ronald E. Clements
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    liked it 3.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1999 — 3 editions
    PENINSULA OF LIES
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    0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings
    Applied Assembly Language on the ELECTRON
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    0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings
    Speech of Hon. Edward Ball, of Ohio, on the Nebraska and Kansas bill : delivered in the House of Representatives, May 9, 1854. 1854 [Leather Bound]
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    0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings

    Edward Ball (American author)

    American history writer and journalist (born 1958)

    Edward Ball

    Born1958 (age 66–67)
    Savannah, Georgia, U.S.
    OccupationAuthor, journalist
    Alma materBrown University
    Years activeSince 1987
    edwardball.com

    Edward Ball (born 1958) is an American author who has written multiple works on topics such as history and biography. He is best known for works that explore the complex past of his family, whose members were major rice planters and slaveholders in South Carolina for nearly 300 years. One of his more well known works is based around an African-American family, descended from one member of this family and an enslaved woman, whose members became successful artists and musicians in the Jazz Age.

    The Ball Family Slaveholder Index (BFSI) reports that between 1698 and 1865, six generations of the Ball family "owned more than twenty rice plantations in Lowcountry South Carolina and enslaved nearly 4,000 Africans and African Americans." Edward Ball, who completed his MA in 1984, worked as a freelance journalist before he began researching and writing about his family's history of slaveholding.

    His books include Slaves in the Family (1998), which won a National Book Award. In Slaves in the Family, he described his great-great grandfather, Isaac Ball (1785-1825), a fifth generation member of the Ball family of slaveholders, who inherited the Comingtee plantation, near Charleston and owned 571 enslaved people.

    He was also recognized for his Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy (2020). In the Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy, he wrote about his maternal great-great-grandfather, Constant Lecorgne (1832 -n.d. ). At one time, he was officially classified as "colored," which denoted that he was a mulatto or a mixed race person at the time. Having European ancestors, he changed his name and passed a

  • His books include Slaves in
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