This collection consists of 23 boxes of materials related to the life and career of Dr. Francis Butler Simkins. Included in the collection are correspondence, writings, personal and biographical materials and a collection of miscellaneous materials. The collection is divided into the following series: Correspondence, Manuscripts, Personal and Biographical, and Miscellaneous
"A staunch activist for the study of southern history as a significant part of American history, Francis Butler Simkins (1897-1966) is today recognized as one of the twentieth century's great thinkers writing on southern history. This detailed biography examines the factors in Simkins's life that contributed to his being a radical liberal in his youth and maturing into what some termed a "reactionary conservative." Through it all, there can be little question that Simkins was a complex and eccentric man whose writing is often compared to the works of his more famous contemporaries C. Vann Woodward and Stanley Elkins." "This biography of one of the South's leading scholars illuminates the inner workings of an eccentric and even inscrutable man. As he orders Simkins's powerful intellect and personal demons, James Humphreys strives to determine the impact of Simkins's work on southern historiography and the larger public issues - especially those associated with race - that dominated his world."--BOOK JACKET.
This book describes the turbulent transformation of South Carolina from a colony rent by sectional conflict into a state dominated by the South's most unified and politically powerful planter leadership. Rachel Klein unravels the sources of conflict and growing unity, showing how a deep commitment to slavery enabled leaders from both low- and backcountry to define the terms of political and ideological compromise. The spread of cotton into the backcountry, often invoked as the reason for South Carolina's political unification, actually concluded a complex struggle for power and legitimacy. Beginning with the Regulator Uprising of the 1760s, Klein demonstrates how backcountry leaders both gained authority among yeoman constituents and assumed a powerful role within state government. By defining slavery as the natural extension of familial inequality, backcountry ministers strengthened the planter class. At the same time, evangelical religion, like the backcountry's dominant political language, expressed yet contained the persisting tensions between planters and yeomen. Klein weaves social, political, and religious history into a formidable account of planter class formation and southern frontier development.
A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.
