was born on this date in 1847.
From the review at Amazon.com of T.J. Stiles’s Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War:
James is often grouped with famous frontier criminals like Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy, but he’s best understood as a Southerner who forged partisan alliances in postwar Missouri and promoted himself as a latter-day Robin Hood. Stiles describes James as “a foul-mouthed killer who hated as fiercely as anyone on the planet” and places his life in the context of “the struggle for–or rather, against–black freedom.” Stiles’s fundamental point about James is as startling as it is convincing: “In his political consciousness and close alliance with a propagandist and power broker, in his efforts to win media attention with his crimes … Jesse James was a forerunner of the modern terrorist.”