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In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death. The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in the Union. The v...
A sweeping and path-breaking history of the post–World War II decades, during which an activist federal government guided the country toward the first real flowering of the American Dream. In The Gifted Generation, historian David Goldfield examines the generation immediately after World War II and argues that the federal government was instrumental in the great economic, social, and environmental progress of the era. Following the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation, the returning vets and their children took the unprecedented economic growth and federal activism to new heights. This generation was led by presidents who believed in the commonwealth ideal: the belief that federal legisla...
"Goldfield looks at an array of issues from the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemmings controversy to debates over the Confederate flag to the proliferation of African American history museums and monuments in the region. Finally, he recalls his work as a consultant on U.S. Supreme Court cases involving a majority black voting district in North Carolina, as a coauthor of an environmental and economic impact study of offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and as a mitigating witness in the sentencing phases of six racially polarizing death penalty cases. His contributions, Goldfield hopes, made history more "real" to people in vocations outside of academia."--BOOK JACKET.
Publisher description
In the updated edition of his sweeping narrative on southern history, David Goldfield brings this extensive study into the present with a timely assessment of the unresolved issues surrounding the Civil War's sesquicentennial commemoration. Traversing a hundred and fifty years of memory, Goldfield confronts the remnants of the American Civil War that survive in the hearts of many of the South's residents and in the national news headlines of battle flags, racial injustice, and religious conflicts. Goldfield candidly discusses how and why white southern men fashioned the myths of the Lost Cause and Redemption out of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and how they shaped a religion to canonize ...
In "Black, White, and Southern," David R. Goldfield shows how the struggles of black southerners to lift the barriers that had historically separated them from their white counterparts not only brought about the demise of white supremacy but did so without destroying the South's unique culture. Indeed, it is Goldfield's contention that the civil rights crusade has strengthened the South's cultural heritage, making it possible for black southeners to embrace their region unfettered by fear and frustration and for whites to leave behind decades of guilt and condemnation. In support of his analysis Goldfield presents a sweeping examination of the evolution of southern race relations over the past fifty years. He provides moving accounts of the major moments of the civil rights era, and he looks at more recent efforts by blacks to achieve economic and class parity. This history of the crusade for black equality is in the end they story of the South itself and of the powerful forces of redemption that Goldfield attests are still working to shape the future of the region.
The urban growth of Virginia during the decade and a half before the Civil War has been an unjustly neglected subject in American history. With this authoritative book David Goldfield fills a long-standing gap in historical scholarship by providing much new information and a fresh perspective on urban development in the Old Dominion during the turbulent antebellum years. According to Goldfield’s interpretation, the urbanization of Virginia was prompted, in part, by the response of the state’s leaders to the sectionalism that increasingly influenced prewar southern ideas. Caught up in the intense competition for western trade and commerce, Virginia’s urbanizers dreamed of railroads and ...
The second edition of Urban America, like the first edition, is distinguished by its emphasis on the spatial relationships within and between cities. This emphasis a study of the geographical patterns of residential, commercial, political, and cultural development, allows a balanced, flexible examination of the varied aspects of urban life. It permits a comprehensive look at the social, economic, political, and cultural history of the city. At the same time, this edition minimizes its review of spatial theory; many students and instructors told us the theoretical material tended to encumber rather than enlighten. -- Preface.