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As a city of the upper South intimately connected to the northeastern cities, the southern slave trade, and the Virginia countryside, Richmond embodied many of the contradictions of mid-nineteenth-century America. Gregg D. Kimball expands the usual scope of urban studies by depicting the Richmond community as a series of dynamic, overlapping networks to show how various groups of Richmonders understood themselves and their society. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and private letters, Kimball elicits new perspectives regarding people’s sense of identity. Kimball first situates the city and its residents within the larger American culture and Virginia countryside, especially noting ...
The Old South has traditionally been portrayed as an insular and backward-looking society. The Old South's Modern Worlds looks beyond this myth to identify some of the many ways that antebellum southerners were enmeshed in the modernizing trends of their time. The essays gathered in this volume not only tell unexpected narratives of the Old South, they also explore the compatibility of slavery-the defining feature of antebellum southern life-with cultural and material markers of modernity such as moral reform, cities, and industry. Considered as proponents of American manifest destiny, for example, antebellum southern politicians look more like nationalists and less like separatists. Though ...
Tracing the erosion of white elite paternalism in Jim Crow Virginia, Douglas Smith reveals a surprising fluidity in southern racial politics in the decades between World War I and the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Smith draws on official records, private correspondence, and letters to newspapers from otherwise anonymous Virginians to capture a wide and varied range of black and white voices. African Americans emerge as central characters in the narrative, as Smith chronicles their efforts to obtain access to public schools and libraries, protection under the law, and the equitable distribution of municipal resources. This acceleration of black resistance to white...
An examination of the culinary origins of African American soul food finds the unique cuisine, rooted in the American South, is a mix of European, Asian, African, and Amerindian food cultures.
Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world’s dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry. In Mastering Iron, Anne Kelly Knowles argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analys...
This exploration of Richmond's burial landscape over the past 300 years reveals in illuminating detail how racism and the color line have consistently shaped death, burial, and remembrance in this storied Southern capital. Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, holds one of the most dramatic landscapes of death in the nation. Its burial grounds show the sweep of Southern history on an epic scale, from the earliest English encounters with the Powhatan at the falls of the James River through slavery, the Civil War, and the long reckoning that followed. And while the region's deathways and burial practices have developed in surprising directions over these centuries, one ele...
Little happened in 1859 that would have told Americans there were on the precipice of a continent-wide war and the end of the most powerful slave society in the world. Yet, within eighteen months of the end of 1859 conflict descended on the nation and familiar characters were playing unfamiliar roles. Robert E. Lee was in command of troops at Harpers Ferry. Tom Jackson was a math professor at VMI, though he will lead cadets to ensure order at the hanging of John Brown at the very end of the year. Sam Grant was a bill collector in St. Louis, and "Cump" Sherman was heading a military school in Louisiana. Jefferson Davis was a senator, and Abraham Lincoln was a successful lawyer and failed senatorial candidate.
This book is the first monograph on the role of the German population minority in the southern states in the American Civil War. It points out that Germans were quite involved in the fighting and, for the most part, had a positive attitude towards slavery. A comparative analysis presents the German militia, the leaders, consuls, blockade breakers and businessmen of the cities of Charleston, Richmond and New Orleans. The appendix contains an extensive survey of primary and secondary sources, including a tabular list of relatives of ethnically German military units with names, origin, rank, vocation, income and number of slaves owned. The book can serve as an archives guide for further related work by historians, military researchers and genealogists.
A panoramic history of the Jewish American South, from European colonization to today In 1669, the Carolina colony issued the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which offered freedom of worship to “Jews, heathens, and other dissenters,” ushering in an era that would see Jews settle in cities and towns throughout what would become the Confederate States. The Jewish South tells their stories, and those of their descendants and coreligionists who followed, providing the first narrative history of southern Jews. Drawing on a wealth of original archival findings spanning three centuries, Shari Rabin sheds new light on the complicated decisions that southern Jews made—as individuals, fam...
Becoming Free in the Cotton South challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, Susan Eva O’Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.This boldly argued work focuses on a small place—the southwest corner of Georgia—in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women’s experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom? The reality of slavery’s demise is harsh: in this land where cotton ...