They wrote histories, memoirs, and novels. And then, with the work of Redemption complete, more stories were published so that terrorists and bandits would be remembered as knights and champions. Jesse James is America’s own Robin Hood, an outlaw hailed in novels, film, and music for standing against the great forces of industrial capitalism, the railroads, and the robber barons of the North. Art hides the truth of Jesse James—that he was the scion of a slaveholding family, that he fought on the side of slavery and then against Reconstruction, and that in his first train robbery he wore a Ku
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