The Promise of the New South
The Promise of the New South

Author: Edward L. Ayers

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-09-07

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 0199886830

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At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic Redeemers swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society. The Atlantic called it "one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years.

Lessons in Progress
Lessons in Progress

Author: Michael Dennis

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780252026171

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Lessons in Progress provides a detailed look at how progressivism transformed higher education in the New South. Orchestrated by an alliance of northern philanthropists and southern intellectuals, modernizing universities focused on practical, utilitarian education aimed at reinvigorating the South through technological advancement. They also offered an institutional vehicle by which a new, urban middle class could impose order on a society in flux. Michael Dennis charts the emergence of the modern southern university through the administrations of four university presidents: Edwin Alderman (Virginia), Samuel C. Mitchell (South Carolina), Walter Barnard Hill (Georgia), and Charles Dabney (Tennessee). He shows how these administrative leaders worked to professionalize the university and to knit together university and state agencies, promoting a social service role in which university personnel would serve as expert advisors on everything from public health to highway construction. Dennis also explains how the programs of educational progressives perpetuated traditional divisions of race, sex, and class. The Tuskegee/Hampton model favored industrial education for blacks whose labor would support the South's expanding urban industrial complex, while education for women was careful not to disturb conventional notions of a woman's place. White workers found themselves subject to an increasingly centralized system of education that challenged their traditional independence. State universities in the New South were not isolated enclaves of classical learning but rather were inextricably tied to social reform initiatives. Seeking a more practical and socially responsible form of education, university modernizers succeeded in establishing the framework of a more modern, bureaucratic state. Despite their accomplishments, however, they failed to generate the kind of economic progress they had envisioned for the South.

Katharine and R.J. Reynolds
Katharine and R.J. Reynolds

Author: Michele Gillespie

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2012-10-01

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 0820344656

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“A tour de force . . . a top-notch study of a powerful couple negotiating the shifting socioeconomic world of the New South and early corporate America.”—Journal of American History Separately they were formidable—together they were unstoppable. Despite their intriguing lives and the deep impact they had on their community and region, the story of Richard Joshua Reynolds and Katharine Smith Reynolds has never been fully told. Now Michele Gillespie provides a sweeping account of how R. J. and Katharine succeeded in realizing their American dreams. From relatively modest beginnings, R. J. launched the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which would eventually develop two hugely profitable products, Prince Albert pipe tobacco and Camel cigarettes. His marriage in 1905 to Katharine Smith, a dynamic woman thirty years his junior, marked the beginning of a unique partnership that went well beyond the family. As a couple, the Reynoldses conducted a far-ranging social life and, under Katharine’s direction, built Reynolda House, a breathtaking estate and model farm. Katharine and R. J. Reynolds “is an engrossing study of a power couple extraordinaire . . . Telling us much about an unusual relationship, Michele Gillespie also provides a new way to understand how the post-Reconstruction New South elite helped construct business structures, social relations, and racial hierarchies. The result is an important addition to our understanding of the industrial South in the North Carolina Piedmont heartland” (William A. Link, author of The Paradox of Southern Progressivism). “Ms. Gillespie uses Katharine’s life and work as a kind of prism through which to view the prejudices and predilections of Southern culture in the 1910s and 1920s.”—The Wall Street Journal

In Lonely Places
In Lonely Places

Author: Imogen Sara Smith

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0786489081

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Although film noir is traditionally associated with the mean streets of the Dark City, this volume explores the genre from a new angle, focusing on non-urban settings. Through detailed readings of more than 100 films set in suburbs, small towns, on the road, in the desert, borderlands and the vast, empty West, the author investigates the alienation expressed by film noir, pinpointing its motivation in the conflict between desires for escape, autonomy and freedom--and fears of loneliness, exile and dissolution. Through such films as Out of the Past, They Live by Night and A Touch of Evil, this critical study examines how film noir reflected radical changes in the physical and social landscapes of postwar America, defining the genre's contribution to the eternal debate between the values of individualism and community.

Daughters Of Canaan
Daughters Of Canaan

Author: Margaret Ripley Wolfe

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 0813189837

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From Gone with the Wind to Designing Women, images of southern females that emerge from fiction and film tend to obscure the diversity of American women from below the Mason-Dixon line. In a work that deftly lays bare a myriad of myths and stereotypes while presenting true stories of ambition, grit, and endurance, Margaret Ripley Wolfe offers the first professional historical synthesis of southern women's experiences across the centuries. In telling their story, she considers many ordinary lives—those of Native-American, African-American, and white women from the Tidewater region and Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the Gulf Coastal Plain, women whose varied economic and social circumstances resist simple explanations. Wolfe examines critical eras, outstanding personalities and groups—wives, mothers, pioneers, soldiers, suffragists, politicians, and civil rights activists—and the impact of the passage of time and the pressure of historical forces on the region's females. The historical southern woman, argues Wolfe, has operated under a number of handicaps, bearing the full weight of southern history, mythology, and legend. Added to these have been the limitations of being female in a patriarchal society and the constraining images of the "southern belle" and her mentor, the "southern lady." In addition, the specter of race has haunted all southern women. Gender is a common denominator, but according to Wolfe, it does not transcend race, class, point of view, or a host of other factors. Intrigued by the imagery as well as the irony of biblical stories and southern history, Wolfe titles her work Daughters of Canaan. Canaan symbolizes promise, and for activist women in particular the South has been about promise as much as fulfillment. General readers and students of southern and women's history will be drawn to Wolfe's engrossing chronicle.

To Get a Better School System
To Get a Better School System

Author: Gene B. Preuss

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1603443746

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Gene B. Preuss examines not only the public policy wrangling and historical context leading up to and surrounding the Gilmer-Akin legislation, but also places the discussion in the milieu of the national movement for school reform.

The Big House After Slavery
The Big House After Slavery

Author: Amy Feely Morsman

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2010-09-13

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0813930030

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Using newspapers, periodicals, organization records, and numerous letters from Virginia planation families, Morsman captures how these frustrated elites made sense of embarrassing postwar changes, in the private but also in the public spheres they inhabited. Morsman suggests that the planters' adaptations may have been carried away from the crumbling plantations by their adult children into the urban house-holds of the New South. --Book Jacket.

Entangled by White Supremacy
Entangled by White Supremacy

Author: Janet Hudson

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2009-03-20

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0813125022

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In Entangled by White Supremacy: Reform in World War I-era South Carolina, Janet G. Hudson analyzes World War I-era South Carolina, a state whose white minority maintained political power by rigidly enforcing white supremacy over its African American majority. Considering the aspirations and actions of both black and white reformers, Hudson looks at African American activism, the vigor of white reformers, and the influence of a multifaceted ideology of white supremacy that became a barrier to the region’s progress. Detailing African American resistance to white supremacy long before the traditional Civil Rights era, the book illuminates the critical nature of South Carolina to the civil rights movement and to the later demise of Progressivism.

Virginia's Private War
Virginia's Private War

Author: William Alan Blair

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9780195140477

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However, the book does not portray the population as uniformly united in a Lost Cause. Virginians complained a great deal about the management of the war. Such complaints, ironically, may have prolonged the war, for some of the Confederacy's leaders responded by forcing the wealthy to shoulder more of the burden for prosecuting the conflict. Substitution ended, and the men who stayed home became government growers who distributed goods at reduced cost to the poor. But ultimately, as the case is made in Virginia's Private War, none of these efforts could stave off an enemy who strained the resources of Rebel Virginians to the breaking point.

The Routledge History of Rural America
The Routledge History of Rural America

Author: Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-14

Total Pages: 611

ISBN-13: 1135054975

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The Routledge History of Rural America charts the course of rural life in the United States, raising questions about what makes a place rural and how rural places have shaped the history of the nation. Bringing together leading scholars to analyze a wide array of themes in rural history and culture, this text is a state-of-the-art resource for students, scholars, and educators at all levels. This Routledge History provides a regional context for understanding change in rural communities across America and examines a number of areas where the history of rural people has deviated from the American mainstream. Readers will come away with an enhanced understanding of the interplay between urban and rural areas, a knowledge of the regional differences within the rural United States, and an awareness of the importance of agriculture and rural life to American society. The book is divided into four main sections: regions of rural America, rural lives in context, change and development, and resources for scholars and teachers. Examining the essays on the regions of rural America, readers can discover what makes New England different from the South, and why the Midwest and Mountain West are quite different places. The chapters on rural lives provide an entrée into the social and cultural history of rural peoples – women, children and men – as well as a description of some of the forces shaping rural communities, such as immigration, race and religious difference. Chapters on change and development examine the forces molding the countryside, such as rural-urban tensions, technological change and increasing globalization. The final section will help scholars and educators integrate rural history into their research, writing, and classrooms. By breaking the field of rural history into so many pieces, this volume adds depth and complexity to the history of the United States, shedding light on an understudied aspect of the American mythology and beliefs about the American dream.