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 ...

As Mississippi was poised to vote on secession in 1861, Knight said, the men of Jones County gathered to take their own vote. Just seven favored secession, he said. Everyone else wanted to remain ...

“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.

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 Free State of Jones (opening in theaters this weekend), Matthew McConaughey stars as Newt Knight, a defiant farmer who deserted from the Confederate army and led an armed rebellion against the ...

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 ...