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During the depression of the 1890s, a young Iowa newspaperman, indignant over the excesses of the Gilded Age, led a group of midwesterners to the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, where they established a model community based on the utopian ideals of Henry George. In Women of Fair Hope, Paul M. Gaston follows the dreams and achievements of three extraordinary women—an early feminist reformer, an educator, and a freed slave—whose individual desires to create a fairer, more equitable society led them to play important roles in the life of that community.
This fascinating story of Amanda America Dickson, born the privileged daughter of a white planter and an unconsenting slave in antebellum Georgia, shows how strong-willed individuals defied racial strictures for the sake of family. Kent Anderson Leslie uses the events of Dickson's life to explore the forces driving southern race and gender relations from the days of King Cotton through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and New South eras. Although legally a slave herself well into her adolescence, Dickson was much favored by her father and lived comfortably in his house, receiving a genteel upbringing and education. After her father died in 1885 Dickson inherited most of his half-million dollar...
These essays address issues like police regionalization, the role of police unions, the use of police tactical units, and the role of women in policing.
Inside the Great House explores the nature of family life and kinship in planter households of the Chesapeake during the eighteenth century—a pivotal era in the history of the American family. Drawing on a wide assortment of personal documents—among them wills, inventories, diaries, family letters, memoirs, and autobiographies—as well as on the insights of such disciplines as psychology, demography, and anthropology, Daniel Blake Smith examines family values and behavior in a plantation society. Focusing on the emotional texture of the household, he probes deeply into personal values and relationships within the family and the surrounding circle of kin. Childrearing practices, male-fem...
Throughout history, groups of people disillusioned with society have tried to create utopian communities organized on new principles. Typically, they hold some or all of their property in common. Often, they are motivated by religious convictions, or by some type of socialist ideology. While many of these communities collapsed, some in a matter of months, a few of them continued for decades and even generations. This book analyzes what makes a utopian group successful and what can be learned from their example. Among the most successful of these utopian experiments were those inspired by the teachings of American economist Henry George. George's vision of expanded individual freedom coupled with economic justice gives us a map towards a better world.
In this exquisitely wrought memoir of a committed life, historian, and civil rights activist, Paul Gaston reveals his deep roots in Fairhope---the unique Utopian community founded in 1894 by his grandfather on the shores of Mobile Bay, Alabama. Fairhope grew into a unique political, economic, and educational experiment and a center of radical economic and educational ideals. As time passed, however, Fairhope's radical nature went into decline. By the early 1950s, the author began to look outward for ways to take part in the coming struggle---the civil rights movement. Gaston's career at the University of Virginia, where he taught from 1957-97, forms the core of Coming of Age in Utopia.
Challenging the conventional understandings of literary naturalism defined primarily through its male writers, Donna M. Campbell examines the ways in which American women writers wrote naturalistic fiction and redefined its principles for their own purposes. Bitter Tastes looks at examples from Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and others and positions their work within the naturalistic canon that arose near the turn of the twentieth century. Campbell further places these women writers in a broader context by tracing their relationship to early film, which, like naturalism, claimed the ability to represent elemental social truths through a documentary method. Women had a significant presence in early film and constituted 40 percent of scenario writers--in many cases they also served as directors and producers. Campbell explores the features of naturalism that assumed special prominence in women's writing and early film and how the work of these early naturalists diverged from that of their male counterparts in important ways.