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At the time of the Civil War, roughly three out of every four southern whites did not own slaves. Most of the rest owned only a few. Until recently, these "common whites" have been largely forgotten. In the past few years, several important studies have examined common whites in individual counties or groups of counties, but they have focused on family life, the economy, or other specific features of the common-white life. Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina is the first comprehensive examination of these non-slaveholders and small slaveholders in over forty years. Using North Carolina as a case in point, Bill Cecil-Fronsman has sketched a broad portrait of the worl...
Ten of the best articles in American history published in 2006 selected from over 300 learned and popular journals. Topics range from the general to the specific and cover all aspects of American history, from the early days of the republic through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These are the questions that today's historians are asking.
In an eye-opening book that Booklist praised as ''impressively documented, essential Civil War reading,'' historian David Williams lays bare the myth of a united confederacy, revealing that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars - an external one that we know so much about and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. Bitterly Divided skillfully shows that from the Confederacy's very beginnings white Southerners were as likely to have opposed secession as supported it, and they undermined the Confederate war effort at nearly every turn. In just one of many telling examples in this rich and surprising narrative history, Williams shows that...
The Civil War and Reconstruction changed the face of social welfare provision in the South as thousands of people received public assistance for the first time in their lives. This book examines the history of southern social welfare institutions and policies in those formative years. Ten original essays explore the local nature of welfare and the limited role of the state prior to the New Deal. The contributors consider such factors as southern distinctiveness, the impact of gender on policy and practice, and ways in which welfare practices reinforced social hierarchies. By examining the role of the South’s unique political economy, the impact of racism on social institutions, and the region’s experience of war, this book makes it clear that the South’s social welfare story is no mere carbon copy of the nation’s.
This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture offers a timely, authoritative, and interdisciplinary exploration of issues related to social class in the South from the colonial era to the present. With introductory essays by J. Wayne Flynt and by editors Larry J. Griffin and Peggy G. Hargis, the volume is a comprehensive, stand-alone reference to this complex subject, which underpins the history of the region and shapes its future. In 58 thematic essays and 103 topical entries, the contributors explore the effects of class on all aspects of life in the South--its role in Indian removal, the Civil War, the New Deal, and the civil rights movement, for example, and how it has been manifested in religion, sports, country and gospel music, and matters of gender. Artisans and the working class, indentured workers and steelworkers, the Freedmen's Bureau and the Knights of Labor are all examined. This volume provides a full investigation of social class in the region and situates class concerns at the center of our understanding of Southern culture.
Much of the current reassessment of race, culture, and criminal justice in the nineteenth-century South has been based on intensive community studies. Drawing on previously untapped sources, the nine original papers collected here represent some of the best new work on how racial justice can be shaped by the particulars of time and place. Although each essay is anchored in the local, several important larger themes emerge across the volume--such as the importance of personality and place, the movement of former slaves from the capriciousness of "plantation justice" to the (theoretically) more evenhanded processes of the courts, and the increased presence of government in daily aspects of Ame...
Never did so large a proportion of the American population leave home for an extended period and produce such a detailed record of its experiences in the form of correspondence, diaries, and other papers as during the Civil War. Based on research in more
Special volume celebrating a 250-year-old American church body In 1748 six Lutheran pastors and laity from ten congregations gathered in Philadelphia under German missionary pastor Henry Melchior Muhlenberg to form the Ministerium of Pennsylvania the first Lutheran church body in North America. These early American Lutherans stood at the crossroads of Lutheran orthodoxy, pietism, and rationalism as they faced the very new, very American challenge of forging a missional, confessional identity within their increasingly pluralistic and multi-religious society. Now, more than 250 years later, this choice selection of essays, addresses, and other pieces celebrates the ongoing legacy of the Ministerium and will allow churches in the twenty-first century to glean new wisdom from a pioneering colonial church body.
Lines in the Sandis Timothy Lockley’s nuanced look at the interaction between nonslaveholding whites and African Americans in lowcountry Georgia from the introduction of slavery in the state to the beginning of the Civil War. The study focuses on poor whites living in a society where they were dominated politically and economically by a planter elite and outnumbered by slaves. Lockley argues that the division between nonslaveholding whites and African Americans was not fixed or insurmountable. Pulling evidence from travel accounts, slave narratives, newspapers, and court documents, he reveals that these groups formed myriad kinds of relationships, sometimes out of mutual affection, sometimes for mutual advantage, but always in spite of the disapproving authority of the planter class. Lockley has synthesized an impressive amount of material to create a rich social history that illuminates the lives of both blacks and whites. His abundant detail and clear narrative style make this first book-length examination of a complicated and overlooked topic both fascinating and accessible.
Selected from papers presented at the 2000 Citadel Conference on the South, this collection of essays casts additional light on the southern experience and illuminates some of the directions its formal study may take in the new century. Emory Thomas opens the collection with a meditation on the shortcomings of the historical literature on the Civil War era. Essays by James McMillin, Kirsten Wood, and Patrick Breen revise estimates about the volume of the African slave trade, reveal how white widows embraced paternalism, and explore new ramifications of the fear of slave insurrection. Essays by Christopher Phillips on the birth of southern identity and by Brian Dirck and Christopher Waldrep on the key role language played in waging and in resolving the Civil War round out the discussion of the Old South. Turning to the New South, the next groups of essays examine religion and race relations during the Jim Crow era. Paul Harvey, Joan Marie Johnson, James O. Farmer Jr., and William Glass show how the beliefs of various Protestant churches - Pentecostal, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Methodist - produced surprising episodes of racial interaction, gave rise to at least one vocal c