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Many Excellent People examines the nature of North Carolina's social system, particularly race and class relations, power, and inequality, during the last half of the nineteenth century. Paul Escott portrays North Carolina's major social groups, focusing on the elite, the ordinary white farmers or workers, and the blacks, and analyzes their attitudes, social structure, and power relationships. Quoting frequently from a remarkable array of letters, journals, diaries, and other primary sources, he shows vividly the impact of the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Populism, and the rise of the New South industrialism on southern society. Working within the new social history and using detailed analyses of five representative counties, wartime violence, Ku Klux Klan membership, stock-law legislation, and textile mill records, Escott reaches telling conclusions on the interplay of race, class, and politics. Despite fundamental political and economic reforms, Escott argues, North Carolina's social system remained as hierarchical and undemocratic in 1900 as it had been in 1850.
Slavery Remembered is the first major attempt to analyze the slave narratives gathered as part of the Federal Writers' Project. Paul Escott's sensitive examination of each of the nearly 2,400 narratives and his quantitative analysis of the narratives as a whole eloquently present the differing beliefs and experiences of masters and slaves. The book describes slave attitudes and actions; slave-master relationships; the conditions of slave life, including diet, physical treatment, working conditions, housing, forms of resistance, and black overseers; slave cultural institutions; status distinctions among slaves; experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction; and the subsequent life histories of the former slaves. An important contribution to the study of American slavery, Slavery Remembered is an ideal classroom text for American history surveys as well as more specialized courses.
Analyzes the narratives of former slaves to determine their attitudes about plantation life, Black culture, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction
Throughout the Civil War, newspaper headlines and stories repeatedly asked some variation of the question posed by the New York Times in 1862, "What shall we do with the negro?" The future status of African Americans was a pressing issue for those in both the North and in the South. Consulting a broad range of contemporary newspapers, magazines, books, army records, government documents, publications of citizens’ organizations, letters, diaries, and other sources, Paul D. Escott examines the attitudes and actions of Northerners and Southerners regarding the future of African Americans after the end of slavery. "What Shall We Do with the Negro?" demonstrates how historians together with our...
Arguably, no event since the American Revolution has had a greater impact on US history than the Civil War. This devastating and formative conflict occupies a permanent place in the nation's psyche and continues to shape race relations, economic development, and regional politics. Naturally, an event of such significance has attracted much attention from historians, and tens of thousands of books have been published on the subject. Despite this breadth of study, new perspectives and tools are opening up fresh avenues of inquiry into this seminal era. In this timely and thoughtful book, Paul D. Escott surveys the current state of Civil War studies and explores the latest developments in resea...
The secession of the southern states from the Union was not merely a culmination of certain events; it was also the beginning of the trial of Confederate nationalism. The slaveholding elite which had led the South out of the Union now had to solidify its support among the nonslaveholding small farmers, a class that constituted the bulk of the white population.But Jefferson Davis and the new government were greatly hampered in their bid for widespread public support, partially because of the same force that had resulted in secession -- the strong states' rights predisposition of many southerners and their opposition to a strong central government -- and partially because of the great social a...
"First published in 1992, it traced the story of black North Carolinians from the colonial period into the 1990s. A revised edition issued in 2002 that included a new chapter examining the expanding political influence of North Carolina's African Americans and the rise of effective black politicians. This new, second revised edition brings the discussion through the historic presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008"--Page 4 of cover
The first book that compares the Confederate South and Southern Italy in two contemporaneous civil wars during 1861-1865.
“Truly impressive. Travels uncharted terrain, moving deftly through a vast scholarship in two languages. The research is sound, the prose crisp and accessible, and the subject unquestionably important.”—W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory “Illuminates the enduring potency of memory in shaping postwar societies for generations after the fighting ceased, reminding us that both losers and victors often had powerful motives to remember—and to forget.”—Caroline E. Janney, author of Remembering the Civil War “Traces the dynamics of memory in the aftermath of the Spanish and American civil wars and demonstrates how similar processes of closu...
"A masterful and revelatory examination of Reconstruction populated by a cast of compelling characters who leap to life in all their glory, gore, and pathos."--Lawrence N. Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans "Illuminates a complex period, city, and state and advances a reinterpretation of Reconstruction politics that is both welcome and overdue."--Paul D. Escott, author of Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States The chaotic years after the Civil War are often seen as a time of uniquely American idealism--a revolutionary attempt to rebuild the nation that paved the way for the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. But Ad...