In this examination of the rise of agrarian radicalism in the late 19th-century South, Hahn focuses on social change and popular consciousness while exploring populism's kinship with other movements such as labour radicalism.
Follows the development of a rural Illinois community from its origins near the beginning of the nineteenth century, looks at community activity, and tells the stories of ordinary pioneers
This meaty collection of 19 original essays charts continuity and change in the South from the mid-19th century to the present by examining race relations, crime and violence, urban growth, civic and political leadership, mythology, and thought ... These perceptive, suggestive essays provide the best guides available to the changing South. An important book, recommended for university libraries.
In the sixty years before the American Civil War, the South Carolina Upcountry evolved from an isolated subsistence region that served as a stronghold of Jeffersonian Republicanism into a mature cotton-producing region with a burgeoning commercial sector that served as a hotbed of Southern radicalism. This groundbreaking study examines this startling evolution, tracing the growth, logic, and strategy of pro-slavery radicalism and the circumstances and values of white society and politics to analyze why the white majority of the Old South ultimately supported the secession movement that led to bloody civil war.
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, hailed in The Washington Post as "a work of enormous imagination and enterprise" and in The New York Times as "an important, original book," Southern Honor revolutionized our understanding of the antebellum South, revealing how Southern men adopted an ancient honor code that shaped their society from top to bottom.Using legal documents, letters, diaries, and newspaper columns, Wyatt-Brown offers fascinating examples to illuminate the dynamics of Southern life throughout the antebellum period. He describes how Southern whites, living chiefly in small, rural, agrarian surroundings, in which everyone knew everyone else, established the local hierarchy of kinfolk and neighbors according to their individual and familial reputation. By claiming honor and dreading shame, they controlled their slaves, ruled their households, established the social rankings of themselves, kinfolk, and neighbors, and responded ferociously against perceived threats. The shamed and shameless sometimes suffered grievously for defying community norms. Wyatt-Brown further explains how a Southern elite refined the ethic. Learning, gentlemanly behavior, and deliberate rather than reckless resort to arms softened the cruder form, which the author calls "primal honor." In either case, honor required men to demonstrate their prowess and engage in fierce defense of individual, family, community, and regional reputation by duel, physical encounter, or war. Subordination of African-Americans was uppermost in this Southern ethic. Any threat, whether from the slaves themselves or from outside agitation, had to be met forcefully. Slavery was the root cause of the Civil War, but, according to Wyatt-Brown, honor pulled the trigger.Featuring a new introduction by the author, this anniversary edition of a classic work offers readers a compelling view of Southern culture before the Civil War.
The impact of cotton and slavery in the nineteenth century American South was so dramatic and enduring that neither the region nor the nation has yet escaped from the influence of that era of regional prominence.
Each the work of a specialist on the antebellum South, these essays address broad issues such as the slavery system, the growth of the cotton industry, and the growing sectional self-consciousness of the South. The authors' local, microcosmic approaches permit examination of subjects such as local justice, economic failure, slave marriages, and slave insurrection with an in-depth attention rarely possible in general works.
