Reconstruction's Ragged Edge
Reconstruction's Ragged Edge

Author: Steven E. Nash

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2016-01-13

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 146962625X

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In this illuminating study, Steven E. Nash chronicles the history of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the mountains of western North Carolina. Nash presents a complex story of the region's grappling with the war's aftermath, examining the persistent wartime loyalties that informed bitter power struggles between factions of white mountaineers determined to rule. For a brief period, an influx of federal governmental power enabled white anti-Confederates to ally with former slaves in order to lift the Republican Party to power locally and in the state as a whole. Republican success led to a violent response from a transformed class of elites, however, who claimed legitimacy from the antebellum period while pushing for greater integration into the market-oriented New South. Focusing on a region that is still underrepresented in the Reconstruction historiography, Nash illuminates the diversity and complexity of Appalachian political and economic machinations, while bringing to light the broad and complicated issues the era posed to the South and the nation as a whole.

Reconstruction's Ragged Edge
Reconstruction's Ragged Edge

Author: Steven E. Nash

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781469628080

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"Nash analyzes the unfolding of Reconstruction in the mountain counties of southern Appalachia, focusing on the particular ways that region's patterns of development, relatively low levels of prewar slaveholding, political allegiances, histories of violence, etc., shaped the era politically and socially. Nash chronicles the region's political transformation, first as a new politics predicated on wartime loyalty rose in place of the prewar partisan system. He argues this first transition was followed by a further transformation as anti-Confederates relied on the federal government (mostly in the form of the Freedmen's Bureau) to establish a coherent party and platform in the region. Finally, Nash shows how the Conservative resurgence toppled this new regime, with conservatives aggressively courting new economic development schemes in order to connect the region into the burgeoning national markets"--

A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era, 1629-1729
A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era, 1629-1729

Author: Lindley S. Butler

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2022-03-10

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1469667576

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In this book, Lindley S. Butler traverses oft-noted but little understood events in the political and social establishment of the Carolina colony. In the wake of the English Civil Wars in the mid-seventeenth century, King Charles II granted charters to eight Lords Proprietors to establish civil structures, levy duties and taxes, and develop a vast tract of land along the southeastern Atlantic coast. Butler argues that unlike the New England theocracies and Chesapeake plantocracy, the isolated colonial settlements of the Albemarle—the cradle of today's North Carolina—saw their power originate neither in the authority of the church nor in wealth extracted through slave labor, but rather in institutions that emphasized political, legal, and religious freedom for white male landholders. Despite this distinct pattern of economic, legal, and religious development, however, the colony could not avoid conflict among the diverse assemblage of Indigenous, European, and African people living there, all of whom contributed to the future of the state and nation that took shape in subsequent years. Butler provides the first comprehensive history of the proprietary era in North Carolina since the nineteenth century, offering a substantial and accessible reappraisal of this key historical period.

Southern Communities
Southern Communities

Author: Steven E. Nash

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2019-05

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0820372374

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Community is an evolving and complex concept that historians have applied to localities, counties, and the South as a whole in order to ground larger issues in the day-to-day lives of all segments of society. These social networks sometimes unite and sometimes divide people, they can mirror or transcend political boundaries, and they may exist solely within the cultures of like-minded people. This volume explores the nature of southern communities during the long nineteenth century. The contributors build on the work of scholars who have allowed us to see community not simply as a place but instead as an idea in a constant state of definition and redefinition. They reaffirm that there never has been a singular southern community. As editors Steven E. Nash and Bruce E. Stewart reveal, southerners have constructed an array of communities across the region and beyond. Nor do the contributors idealize these communities. Far from being places of cooperation and harmony, southern communities were often rife with competition and discord. Indeed, conflict has constituted a vital part of southern communal development. Taken together, the essays in this volume remind us how community-focused studies can bring us closer to answering those questions posed to Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!: “Tell [us] about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”

A Long Reconstruction
A Long Reconstruction

Author: Paul William Harris

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-02-04

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0197571840

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After slavery was abolished, how far would white America go toward including African Americans as full participants in the country's institutions? Conventional historical timelines mark the end of Reconstruction in the year 1877, but the Methodist Episcopal Church continued to wrestle with issues of racial inclusion for decades after political support for racial reform had receded. An 1844 schism over slavery split Methodism into northern and southern branches, but Union victory in the Civil War provided the northern Methodists with the opportunity to send missionaries and teachers into the territory that had been occupied by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. To a remarkable degree, the M.E. Church succeeded in appealing to freed slaves and white Unionists and thereby built up a biracial membership far surpassing that of any other Protestant denomination. A Long Reconstruction details the denomination's journey with unification and justice. African Americans who joined did so in a spirit of hope that through religious fellowship and cooperation they could gain respect and acceptance and ultimately assume a position of equality and brotherhood with whites. However, as segregation gradually took hold in the South, many northern Methodists evinced the same skepticism as white southerners about the fitness of African Americans for positions of authority and responsibility in an interracial setting. The African American membership was never without strong white allies who helped to sustain the Church's official stance against racial caste but, like the nation as a whole, the M.E. Church placed a growing priority on putting their broken union back together.

Reconstructions
Reconstructions

Author: Thomas J. Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-09-23

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0199723974

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The pivotal era of Reconstruction has inspired an outstanding historical literature. In the half-century after W.E.B. DuBois published Black Reconstruction in America (1935), a host of thoughtful and energetic authors helped to dismantle racist stereotypes about the aftermath of emancipation and Union victory in the Civil War. The resolution of long-running interpretive debates shifted the issues at stake in Reconstruction scholarship, but the topic has remained a vital venue for original exploration of the American past. In Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, eight rising historians survey the latest generation of work and point to promising directions for future research. They show that the field is opening out to address a wider range of adjustments to the experiences and effects of Civil War. Increased interest in cultural history now enriches understandings traditionally centered on social and political history. Attention to gender has joined a focus on labor as a powerful strategy for analyzing negotiations over private and public authority. The contributors suggest that Reconstruction historiography might further thrive by strengthening connections to such subjects as western history, legal history, and diplomatic history, and by redefining the chronological boundaries of the postwar period. The essays provide more than a variety of attractive vantage points for fresh examination of a major phase of American history. By identifying the most exciting recent approaches to a theme previously studied so ably, the collection illuminates the creative process in scholarly historical literature.

Declarations of Dependence
Declarations of Dependence

Author: Gregory P. Downs

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0807834440

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In this highly original study, Gregory Downs argues that the most American of wars, the Civil War, created a seemingly un-American popular politics, rooted not in independence but in voluntary claims of dependence. Through an examination of the pleas and

A Man of Bad Reputation
A Man of Bad Reputation

Author: Drew A. Swanson

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2023-08-29

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1469674726

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Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In recounting Stephens's murder, the subsequent investigation and court proceedings, and the long-delayed confessions that revealed what actually happened at the courthouse in 1870, Drew A. Swanson tells a story of race, politics, and social power shaped by violence and profit. The struggle for dominance in Reconstruction-era rural North Carolina, Swanson argues, was an economic and ecological transformation. Arson, beating, and murder became tools to control people and landscapes, and the ramifications of this violence continued long afterward. The failure to prosecute anyone for decades after John Stephens's assassination left behind a vacuum, as each side shaped its own memory of Stephens and his murder. The malleability of and contested storytelling around Stephens's legacy presents a window into the struggle to control the future of the South.

North Carolina
North Carolina

Author: William A. Link

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-01-16

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 1118833600

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Did You Know? This book is available as a Wiley E-Text. The Wiley E-Text is a complete digital version of the text that makes time spent studying more efficient. Course materials can be accessed on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device—so that learning can take place anytime, anywhere. A more affordable alternative to traditional print, the Wiley E-Text creates a flexible user experience: Access on-the-go Search across content Highlight and take notes Save money! The Wiley E-Text can be purchased in the following ways: Check with your bookstore for available e-textbook options Wiley E-Text: powered by VitalSource ISBN: 978-1-118-83353-7 Directly from: www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell

No Surrender
No Surrender

Author: Keith D. Dickson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-05-18

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1440848947

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A modern and current examination of Reconstruction that explains how the South in the aftermath of defeat in a total war, was still able to exhaust the will of the powerful North using asymmetric warfare. The end of the Civil War may have marked the end of the official fighting, but the Congressional strategy to remake the South during Reconstruction led to a new period of warfare—asymmetric warfare in which the defeated Confederacy became the Southern resistance. Despite all the power at its disposal, the North failed to change the South after nearly 11 years of effort and instead accepted a political-social equilibrium dictated by the South. This book presents Reconstruction through an unconventional lens to explain the process of transition from war to warfare, and finally to equilibrium represented by the emergence of the New South. Author Keith D. Dickson explains how Reconstruction created a false equilibrium in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and was reversed by Congressional action that imposed a new social and political order. By resistance of these actions through asymmetric warfare, the white South was able to establish a new equilibrium—one dictated by the South that opened the path to the New South. Providing insights from an author who is both a respected academic military historian as well as a former practitioner of unconventional warfare as a Special Forces officer, the book covers the historical period 1865–1877, casting the Reconstruction period as an example of protracted asymmetric warfare. This asymmetric warfare was conducted in phases against the Republican state governments. As both the U.S. Congress and the Grant administration abandoned the lofty goals for Reconstruction, a bitterly contested presidential election provided the opportunity to establish conditions favorable to the white South that would in turn lead to a political-social equilibrium that allowed reconciliation to begin.