Here is all of Penn Center's rich past and present, as told through the experiences of its longtime Gullah inhabitants and visitors to St. Helena Island. It is the inspiring story behind the first school for former slaves, from the Civil War through the civil rights movement, illustrated in forty-two captivating photographs.
"For more than 150 years, the Penn Center, located on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, has been an epicenter of African American education, historic preservation, and social justice for tens of thousands of descendants of formerly enslaved West Africans living in the Sea Islands. Founded in 1862 in the midst of the Civil War after the island was secured by Union troops, the Penn School was established by two Northern missionaries, Laura M. Towne and Ellen Murray, to provide a formal education for former slaves who formed the nucleus of the coastal Gullah Geechee community. Burton and Cross examine the intricate history and evolution of the Penn Center over the past 150 years and place it in its modern context. In 1901, the Penn School expanded to become the Penn Normal, Agricultural and Industrial School after adopting the industrial arts curriculum taught at Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes. The educational training stood at the forefront of progressivism and reform as it helped to advance an entire generation and community into the Industrial Age after slavery. This project makes a tremendous contribution with its examination of Penn Center's role in the Civil Rights Movement: it was the only location in South Carolina where interracial groups, including Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Peace Corps, could have safe sanctuary in an era of mandated segregation. During the Sea Island resort boom of the mid- to late-20th century, the Penn Center was instrumental in preserving land on St. Helena. Since 1974, the campus of seventeen historic structures and eight other sites has been designated a National Historic Landmark District, one of only four in the state of South Carolina, and the only African American historic district so named"--
Just seven months into the Civil War, a Union fleet sailed into South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound, landed a ground force, and then made its way upriver to Beaufort. Planters and farmers fled before their attackers, allowing virtually all their major possessions, including ten thousand slaves, to fall into Union hands. Rehearsal for Reconstruction, winner of the Allan Nevins Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Charles S. Sydnor Prize, is historian Willie Lee Rose’s chronicle of change in this Sea Island region from its capture in 1861 through Reconstruction. With epic sweep, Rose demonstrates how Port Royal constituted a stage upon which a dress rehearsal for the South’s postwar era was acted out.
What stories do we tell about America’s once-great industries at a time when they are fading from the landscape? Pennsylvania in Public Memory attempts to answer that question, exploring the emergence of a heritage culture of industry and its loss through the lens of its most representative industrial state. Based on news coverage, interviews, and more than two hundred heritage sites, this book traces the narrative themes that shape modern public memory of coal, steel, railroading, lumber, oil, and agriculture, and that collectively tell a story about national as well as local identity in a changing social and economic world.
In Gullah Spirituals musicologist Eric Crawford traces Gullah Geechee songs from their beginnings in West Africa to their height as songs for social change and Black identity in the twentieth century American South. While much has been done to study, preserve, and interpret Gullah culture in the lowcountry and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, some traditions like the shouting and rowing songs have been all but forgotten. This work, which focuses primarily on South Carolina's St. Helena Island, illuminates the remarkable history, survival, and influence of spirituals since the earliest recordings in the 1860s. Grounded in an oral tradition with a dynamic and evolving character, spirituals proved equally adaptable for use during social and political unrest and in unlikely circumstances. Most notably, the island's songs were used at the turn of the century to help rally support for the United States' involvement in World War I and to calm racial tensions between black and white soldiers. In the 1960s, civil rights activists adopted spirituals as freedom songs, though many were unaware of their connection to the island. Gullah Spirituals uses fieldwork, personal recordings, and oral interviews to build upon earlier studies and includes an appendix with more than fifty transcriptions of St. Helena spirituals, many no longer performed and more than half derived from Crawford's own transcriptions. Through this work, Crawford hopes to restore the cultural memory lost to time while tracing the long arc and historical significance of the St. Helena spirituals.
Southern writers, historians, and artists celebrate the life and career of a beloved mentor, friend, and colleague Edited by southern historians Orville Vernon Burton and Eldred E. Prince, Jr., Becoming Southern Writers pays tribute to South Carolinian Charles Joyner's fifty year career as a southern historian, folklorist, and social activist. Exceptional writers of fact, fiction, and poetry, the contributors to the volume are among Joyner's many friends, admirers, and colleagues as well as those to whom Joyner has served as a mentor. The contributors describe how they came to write about the South and how they came to write about it in the way they do while reflecting on the humanistic tradition of scholarship as lived experience. The contributors constitute a Who's Who of southern writers—from award-winning literary artists to historians. Freed from constraints of their disciplines by Joyner's example, they enthusiastically describe family reunions, involvement in the civil rights movement, research projects, and mentors. While not all contributors are native to the South or the United States and a few write about the South only occasionally, all the essayists root their work in southern history, and all have made distinguished contributions to southern writing. Diverse in theme and style, these writings represent each author's personal reflections on experiences living in and writing about the South while touching on topics that surfaced in Joyner's own works, such as race, family, culture, and place. Whether based on personal or historical events, each one speaks to Joyner's theme that "all history is local history, somewhere."
Stunning in its breadth and conclusions, The Age of Lincoln is a fiercely original history of the five decades that pivoted around the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abolishing slavery, the age's most extraordinary accomplishment, was not its most profound. The enduring legacy of the age of Lincoln was inscribing personal liberty into the nation's millennial aspirations. America has always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s pessimism accompanied marked extremism, as Millerites predicted the Second Coming, utopianists planned perfection, Southerners made slavery an inviolable honor, and Northerners conflated Manifest Destiny with free-market opportunity. Even amid historic political compromises the middle ground collapsed. In a remarkable reappraisal of Lincoln, the distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton shows how the president's authentic Southernness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans. In the violent decades to follow, the extent of that freedom would be contested but not its central place in what defined the country. Presenting a fresh conceptualization of the defining decades of modern America, The Age of Lincoln is narrative history of the highest order.
COMBEE is based upon original research and offers the first full account of Tubman's Civil War service and the Combahee River Raid. In the process, it also offers the story of enslaved families living in bondage and fighting for their freedom, and does so using their own distinct and individual voices.
Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for America’s Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.