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.

Aristocrats of Color
Aristocrats of Color

Author: Willard B. Gatewood

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Published: 2000-05-01

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 1557285934

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Every American city had a small, self-aware, and active black elite, who felt it was their duty to set the standard for the less fortunate members of their race and to lead their communities by example. Professor Gatewood's study examines this class of African Americans by looking at the genealogies and occupations of specific families and individuals throughout the United States and their roles in their various communities. --from publisher description.

The Romance of Reunion
The Romance of Reunion

Author: Nina Silber

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 080786448X

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The reconciliation of North and South following the Civil War depended as much on cultural imagination as on the politics of Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nina Silber documents the transformation from hostile sectionalism to sentimental reunion rhetoric. Northern culture created a notion of reconciliation that romanticized and feminized southern society. In tourist accounts, novels, minstrel shows, and popular magazines, northerners contributed to a mythic and nostalgic picture of the South that served to counter their anxieties regarding the breakdown of class and gender roles in Gilded Age America. Indeed, for many Yankees, the ultimate symbol of the reunion process, and one that served to reinforce Victorian values as well as northern hegemony, was the marriage of a northern man and a southern woman. Southern men also were represented as affirming traditional gender roles. As northern men wrestled with their nation's increasingly global and aggressive foreign policy, the military virtues extolled in Confederate legend became more admired than reviled. By the 1890s, concludes Silber, northern whites had accepted not only a newly resplendent image of Dixie but also a sentimentalized view of postwar reunion.

Engines of Redemption
Engines of Redemption

Author: R. Scott Huffard Jr.

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-10-14

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 146965282X

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After the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction shattered the plantation economy of the Old South, white southerners turned to the railroad to reconstruct capitalism in the region. Examining the rapid growth, systemization, and consolidation of the southern railroad network, R. Scott Huffard Jr. demonstrates how economic and political elites used the symbolic power of the railroad to proclaim a New South had risen. The railroad was more than just an economic engine of growth; it was a powerful symbol of capitalism's advance. However, as the railroad spread across the region, it also introduced new dangers and anxieties. White southerners came to fear the railroad would speed an upending of the racial order, epidemics of yellow fever, train wrecks, violent robberies, and domination by corporate monopolies. To complete the reconstruction of capitalism, railroad corporations and their allies had to sever the negative aspects of railroading from capitalism's powers and deny the railroad's transformative powers to black southerners. This study of the New South's experience with the growing railroad network provides valuable insights into the history of capitalism--how it evolves, expands, and overcomes resistance.

Hunting and Fishing in the New South
Hunting and Fishing in the New South

Author: Scott E. Giltner

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2008-12-01

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1421402378

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This innovative study re-examines the dynamics of race relations in the post–Civil War South from an altogether fresh perspective: field sports. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wealthy white men from Southern cities and the industrial North traveled to the hunting and fishing lodges of the old Confederacy—escaping from the office to socialize among like-minded peers. These sportsmen depended on local black guides who knew the land and fishing holes and could ensure a successful outing. For whites, the ability to hunt and fish freely and employ black laborers became a conspicuous display of their wealth and social standing. But hunting and fishing had been a way of life for all Southerners—blacks included—since colonial times. After the war, African Americans used their mastery of these sports to enter into market activities normally denied people of color, thereby becoming more economically independent from their white employers. Whites came to view black participation in hunting and fishing as a serious threat to the South’s labor system. Scott E. Giltner shows how African-American freedom developed in this racially tense environment—how blacks' sense of competence and authority flourished in a Jim Crow setting. Giltner’s thorough research using slave narratives, sportsmen’s recollections, records of fish and game clubs, and sporting periodicals offers a unique perspective on the African-American struggle for independence from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s.

The Breckinridges of Kentucky
The Breckinridges of Kentucky

Author: James C. Klotter

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 611

ISBN-13: 0813189470

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Across more than six generations—beginning before the Revolutionary War—the Breckinridge family has produced a series of notable leaders. These often controversial men and women included a presidential candidate, a U.S. vice president, cabinet members, generals, women's rights advocates, congressmen, editors, reformers, authors, and church leaders. Along with success, the Breckinridges, like other Americans, faced hardship and war, contended with race, lived through difficult family situations—including a sex scandal—and encountered personal and political failure. An articulate, opinionated, and frank family, the Breckinridges have left a detailed record that allows us a vivid recreation of the range of American history and society.