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Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The fifteen years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.
In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America’s most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation. Dew re-creates the midcentury American South of his childhood--in many respects a boy’s paradise, but one stained by Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow. Through entertainments and "educational" books that belittled African Americans, as well as the living examples of his own family, Dew was indoctrinated in a white supremacy that, at best, was condescendingly paternalistic and, at worst, bru...
Charles Dew's unsurpassed Ironmaker to the Confederacy tells the story of the South's premier ironworks & its intrepid owner, Joseph Reid Anderson. Dew's detailed & rich account masterfully describes Tredegar's struggle to supply the Confederate nation with the weapons of war & is a seminal study of southern manufacturing & industrial slavery. The revised edition includes a new preface by Dr. Dew, additional illustrations, and redesigned maps of the ironworks based on new site research and archaelogy.
A study of African-American workers empowered and partly liberated by their skills. At Buffalo Forge, an extensive ironmaking and farming enterprise in Virginia before the Civil War, a unique treasury of materials yields an "engrossing, often surprising record of everyday life on an estate in the antebellum South" (Kirkus Reviews).
In late 1860 and early 1861, state-appointed commissioners traveled the length and breadth of the slave South carrying a fervent message in pursuit of a clear goal: to persuade the political leadership and the citizenry of the uncommitted slave states to join in the effort to destroy the Union and forge a new Southern nation. Directly refuting the neo-Confederate contention that slavery was neither the reason for secession nor the catalyst for the resulting onset of hostilities in 1861, Charles B. Dew finds in the commissioners' brutally candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary. The commissioners included in their speeches a constitutional justification for...
**** New edition of the Greenwood Press original of 1979 (which is cited in BCL3), with a new introduction, chapter, and a supplementary bibliography. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
About half of today's nation-states originated as some kind of breakaway state. The end of the Cold War witnessed a resurgence of separatist activity affecting nearly every part of the globe and stimulated a new generation of scholars to consider separatism and secession. As the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War approaches, this collection of essays allows us to view within a broader international context one of modern history's bloodiest conflicts over secession. The contributors to this volume consider a wide range of topics related to secession, separatism, and the nationalist passions that inflame such conflicts. The first section of the book examines ethical and moral dimensio...
cent Speak Now Against the Day. His book is a stunning achievement: a sprawling, engrossing, deeply moving account of those Southerners, black and white, who raised their voices to challenge the South's racial mores. . . . (This) is an eloquent and passionate book, and . . . one we cannot afford to forget".--Charles B. Dew, New York Times Book Review.
Lavishly illustrated with seventy-four color plates and fifty black-and-white photographs and drawings, Never for Want of Powder tells the story of a world-class munitions factory constructed by the Confederacy in 1861, the only large-scale permanent building project undertaken by a government often characterized as lacking modern industrial values. In this comprehensive examination of the powder works, five scholars--a historian, physicist, curator, architectural historian, and biographer--bring their combined expertise to the task of chronicling gunpowder production during the Civil War. In doing so, they make a major contribution to understanding the history of wartime technology and Conf...
Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later. Most Americans, black and white, have a singular vision of slavery, one fixed in the mid-nineteenth century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South, and subscribed to Christianity. Here, however, Berlin offers a dynamic vision, a major reinterpretation in which slaves and their owners continually renegotiated the terms of captivity. Slavery was thus made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, econo...