Over the course of his exhaustive three-year research, Free State of Jones director and screenwriter Gary Ross spent time in modern-day Jones County, where Knight remains a divisive character ...

“The Free State of Jones” explores whiteness in the antebellum South and today, Lisa Woolfork says, in ways that resonate with current conversations about race.

The article, written by Richard Grant, succeeds in blending the present with the past about how Jones County became known as the “Free State of Jones.” A movie has been made telling this ...

One of the lesser-known tales of the Civil War - told in the film "Free State of Jones," opening in theaters Friday, June 24 - is similar to one that played out in Alabama, in a county that became ...

After a big Confederate defeat in late 1862, Knight and other Jones County men deserted. ... Needless to say, Knight survives the war — even if the Free State of Jones did not.

As others in Jones and Jasper County, staunch Confederates throughout the war, tell the tale, Newt Knight's Company was composed of "bushwhacking deserters" from the armies of the Confederate States.

Even if you carve his rich personal life out of a cinematic retelling, you’d still have a rebel who, in 1864, managed to prevail over the Confederates in Jones County, Miss., and declare the ...

In the new film "Free State of Jones," Matthew McConaughey plays Confederate soldier Newton Knight, and depending on whom you ask, Knight was either a hero or a traitor.

Inspired by the real-life story of Confederate deserter and activist Newton Knight, the Civil War action movie “The Free State of Jones” is set in Mississippi, but most of the film was shot ...

The movie “Free State of Jones” with Matthew McConaughey in the lead role, focuses on the life of Newton “Newt” Knight, a tough, struggling white farmer who led a sizable revolt against ...

Free State of Jones brings to life one of the Civil War's most extraordinary and counterintuitive episodes, in which a Confederate deserter overthrew his former commanders and established a free ...