Local reporter and historian Jim Wise will launch his new book, Murder in the Courthouse: Reconstruction and Redemption in the North Carolina Piedmont, with a reading and book signing.  When four Ku Klux Klansmen murdered John W. “Chicken” Stephens—a Republican politician and Freedman’s Bureau agent—in the Caswell County courthouse in May 1870, the much-despised NC governor William Holden imposed martial law, suspended habeas corpus, and assigned an infamous Union officer, George W. Kirk, to root out the increasingly violent Klan.  The action led to Holden’s impeachment, and a conservative hegemony in the state that would last (with one brief interruption in the 1890s) for more than 100 years.