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This flowing, instantly engaging narrative tells the story of Savannah from the hopeful arrival of its first permanent English settlers in 1733 to the uncertainties faced by its Civil War survivors in 1865. Alongside the many women and men of European, African, and Native American heritage who helped shaped Savannah's first century and a half, Walter J. Fraser Jr. also shows how war, disease, market forces, fire, and other circumstances left their marks on the city and its people. Among other major developments in Savannah's history, Fraser recalls the hardships of its first residents; the depredations of the Revolutionary War; the relocation of Georgia's capital away from the city; the grow...
An investigation of the issue of race over a generation of labor
Moving southern women's history beyond the plantation, these 13 essays (11 of them never before published) explore the working lives of ordinary women--free black, white, and Native American--in the antebellum South.
During the Civil War, some Confederates sought to prove the distinctiveness of the southern people and to legitimate their desire for a separate national existence through the creation of a uniquely southern literature and culture. Michael Bernath follows the activities of a group of southern writers, thinkers, editors, publishers, educators, and ministers--whom he labels Confederate cultural nationalists--in order to trace the rise and fall of a cultural movement dedicated to liberating the South from its longtime dependence on Northern books, periodicals, and teachers. By analyzing the motives driving the struggle for Confederate intellectual independence, by charting its wartime accomplishments, and by assessing its failures, Bernath makes provocative arguments about the nature of Confederate nationalism, life within the Confederacy, and the perception of southern cultural distinctiveness.
Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians--from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.
"Seizing the New Day is a good book, carefully researched, logically organized, and clearly written.... an excellent model for others who would study change at the local level in this fascinating period of American history. And the volume is handsomely illustrated with well-chosen photographs, drawings, and maps."--H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences For former slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, life was a constant struggle adjusting to freedom while battling whites' attempts to regain control. Using autobiographies, slave narratives, Freedmen's Bureau letters and papers, and other primary documents, Wilbert L. Jenkins attempts to understand how the freedmen saw themselves in the new order and to shed light on their hopes and aspirations. He emphasizes, not the defeat of these aspirations, but rather the victories the freedmen won against white resistance.
An exploration of the ways a particular religious tradition and a distinct social context have interacted over a 300-year period, including the unique story of the oldest and largest African American Calvinist community in America The South Carolina low country has long been regarded—not only in popular imagination and paperback novels but also by respected scholars—as a region dominated by what earlier historians called “a cavalier spirit” and by what later historians have simply described as “a wholehearted devotion to amusement and the neglect of religion and intellectual pursuits.” Such images of the low country have been powerful interpreters of the region because they have ...