Forty years ago, a riot that became known as the Battle of Oxford erupted at the University of Mississippi over the admission of James Meredith, its first black student.
It raged for 14 hours. The violence left two dead — a bystander and a reporter — and 300 injured. Peace was restored by 30,000 combat troops, including the all-white Mississippi National Guard who were federalized by President Kennedy over the protests of segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett.

Today, the city of Oxford, will, for the first time, formally thank those soldiers. The Remembrance Ceremony is due primarily to a writer from New York and a Southern bookseller turned mayor.

The writer is William Doyle, who spent four years researching An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962 (Doubleday, $26). Published last September, it was overshadowed by the terrorist attacks but is now having a second life.

The mayor is Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books. He calls American Insurrection ''a remarkably good book'' that served as a wake-up call to Oxford to ''finally thank the soldiers who saved the town and the university.''

About 100 veterans, attacked as enemy soldiers 40 years ago, are expected to return. They'll be hailed as heroes of what Time called ''the greatest conflict between federal and state authority since the Civil War.''

Doyle discovered that scores of soldiers were nominated for Army Commendation Medals, but Pentagon officials preferred to bury the Battle of Oxford. A 1963 Pentagon memo said: ''Additional attention on the incident would not be in the best interests of the U.S. Army or the nation.''
Doyle disagrees: ''When those soldiers marched out of Oxford in 1962, they stepped into sheer historical oblivion. In a rather amazing twist of history, they will now march back onto that same battlefield, and this time they will be welcomed as heroes.''

His book grew out of a remark he heard in 1996 while working on a TV documentary about presidential tapes. Kennedy aide Burke Marshall mentioned, ''The night we had a little war.''

Doyle says he went south with typical Yankee stereotypes, which were ''exploded and rearranged.'' He sensed some older whites ''thoroughly hated the idea of yet another Northern reporter coming in to exploit one of the state's worst tragedies, an event they'd spent 40 years trying to forget.''

But, he adds, ''maybe you have to be an outsider to fully appreciate the courage of the Mississippi heroes -- the white Mississippi National Guard soldiers -- who risked their lives to uphold the law, for a cause many of them totally disagreed with at the time.''