In less than twenty years Republicans have created a viable opposition to the Democratic party in the South for the first time since the heyday of the Whigs in the 1840s. The turn in Republican fortunes below the Potomac, writes George Brown Tindall in this important new study, owes less to new strategies than to new conditions, for the Southern Strategy was not born yesterday. It was invented or at least first pursued in the 1870s by Rutherford B. Hayes, who called it his Southern Policy. Subsequent changes have been only variations on a theme by Hayes."

African Americans in the state after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow; First published in 1952, South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900 rediscovers a time and a people nearly erased from public memory. In this pathbreaking book, George B. Tindall turns to the period after Reconstruction before a tide of reaction imposed a new system of controls on the black population of the state. He examines the progress and achievements, along with the frustrations, of South Carolina's African Americans in politics, education, labor, and various aspects of social life during the short decades before segregation became the law and custom of the land. Chronicling the evolution of Jim Crow white supremacy, the book originally appeared on the eve of the Civil Rights movement when the nation's system of disfranchisement, segregation, and economic oppression was coming under increasing criticism and attack. Along with Vernon L. Wharton's The Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890 (1947) which also shed new light on the period after Reconstruction, Tindall's treatise served as an important source for C. Vann Woodward's influential The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). South Carolina Negroes now reappears fifty years later in an environment of reaction against the Civil Rights movement, a situation that parallels in many ways the reaction against Reconstruction a century earlier. A new introduction by Tindall reviews the book's origins and its place in the literature of Southern and black history.

Lively yet concise, The Essential Learning Edition of America blends Shi and Tindall's unrivalled narrative style with innovative pedagogy to help students understand major historical developments and strengthen critical interpretive skills. Online adaptive learning tools enhance and assess students' mastery of the core objectives from the text.