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Utilizing biographical, demographic, political, social, and cultural approaches, the nine essays in this book provide a probing look at the South's diversity and its important place in the national past. The authors explore the tension between the South's well-worn mythic images and the diversity that bred such influential leaders as Philip Mazzei, Henry Clay, A. B. Happy Chandler, and John Sherman Cooper. The chapters illustrate the South's complexity in assessing the region's plain folk, slave panics, military strategy, racial reform, and temperance movement. The book untangles the South's mythology and offers fresh and penetrating insights into the ongoing reassessment of the region.

Written by leading experts on the South's rich past, this book provides nine essays on the history of the South. Utilizing biographical, demographic, political, social, and cultural approaches, the essays provide a probing look at the South's diversity and its important place in the national past. The authors explore the tension between the South's well-worn images and the diversity that bred such influential leaders as Philip Mazzei, Henry Clay, A. B. Happy Chandler, and John Sherman Cooper.

The South has always been a land of complexity and change. "A Mythic Land Apart" illustrates this in assessing the region's plain folk, slave panics, military strategy, racial reform, and temperance movement. Whether captured in fiction, film, or historical literature, the South's history remains intertwined with its mythic self. The essays in this book untangle the South's mythololgy and offer fresh and penetrating insights into the ongoing reassessment of the region.

Paul Robeson: A Life of Activism and Art is the biography of an African American icon and a demonstration of historian Lindsey R. Swindall's knack for thorough, detailed research and reflection. Paul Robeson was, at points in his life, an actor, singer, football player, political activist and writer, one of the most diversely talented members of the Harlem Renaissance. Swindall centers Robeson's story around the argument that while Robeson leaned toward Socialism, a Pan-African perspective is fundamental to understanding his life as an artist and political advocate. Many previous works on Robeson have focused primarily on his involvement with the US Communist Party, paying little attention to the broader African influences on his politics and art. With each chapter focused on a decade of his life, this book affords us a fresh look at his story, and the ways in which the struggles, successes and studies of his formative years came to shape him as an artist, activist and man later on. Robeson's story is one not simply of politics and protest, but of a man's lifelong evolution from an athlete to an entertainer to an indispensible man of letters and African American thought. Swindall neatly outlines the events of Robeson's life in a way that freshly presents him as a man whose work was influenced by more than just his circumstances, but by a spirit rooted in dedication to the African's place in American art and politics.

This integrated set of essays introduces students to the complexities of researching and analyzing "race". Chapters focus on the problems historians and social scientists, white and black, north and south, confronted while researching, writing, and interpreting race and slavery from the late nineteenth century until 1953.

This integrated set of essays introduces students to the complexities of researching and analyzing "race". Chapters focus on the problems historians and social scientists, white and black, north and south, confronted while researching, writing, and interpreting race and slavery from the late nineteenth century until 1953.

One of the most controversial historians of the American South, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, has been the object of intense scholarly interest for nearly seventy-five years. His contributions to our knowledge of the social and economic aspects of slavery--along with his well-known racial and class biases--have been discussed extensively. This anthology represents the best work on Phillips published between 1913 and 1986.

The senior editor's introduction examines Phillips' role in the transition to the new social and economic approach that characterizes contemporary historiography. Twenty-six essays and excerpts by recognized authorities assess various aspects of Phillips's writings and career, including his background and training, regional and racial prejudices, methodology, and the historical genres in which he worked. A brief interpretive introduction prefaces each chapter. A chronological listing of the critical literature on Phillips completes the volume. Reflecting the vast scope of Phillips's contributions and his pervasive influence in the field, this collection is pertinent to studies in southern history, historiography, Afro-American history, and the history of race relations.

As a Unionist but also proslavery state during the American Civil War, Kentucky occupied a contentious space both politically and geographically. In many ways, its pragmatic attitude toward compromise left it in a cultural no-man's-land. The constant negotiation between the state's nationalistic and Southern identities left many Kentuckians alienated and conflicted. Lincoln referred to Kentucky as the crown jewel of the Union slave states due to its sizable population, agricultural resources, and geographic position, and these advantages, coupled with the state's difficult relationship to both the Union and slavery, ultimately impacted the outcome of the war. Despite Kentucky's central role, relatively little has been written about the aftermath of the Civil War in the state and how the conflict shaped the commonwealth we know today. New Perspectives on Civil War–Era Kentucky offers readers ten essays that paint a rich and complex image of Kentucky during the Civil War. First appearing in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, these essays cover topics ranging from women in wartime to Black legislators in the postwar period. From diverse perspectives, both inside and outside the state, the contributors shine a light on the complicated identities of Kentucky and its citizens in a defining moment of American history.

Jackie Robinson's story is not only a compelling drama of heroism, but also as a template of the African American freedom struggle. A towering athletic talent, Robinson's greater impact was on preparing the way for the civil rights reform wave following WWII. But Robinson's story has always been far more complex than the public perception has allowed. Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey famously told the young Robinson that he was "looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back." J. Christopher Schutz reveals the real Robinson, as a more defiant, combative spirit than simply the "turn the other cheek" compliant "credit to his race." The triumph of Robinson's inclusion in the white Major Leagues (which presaged blacks' later inclusion in the broader society) also included the slow demise of black-owned commercial enterprise in the Negro Leagues (which likewise presaged the unrecoverable loss of other important black institutions after civil rights gains). Examining this key figure at the crossroads of baseball and civil rights histories, Schutz provides a cohesive exploration of the man and the times that made him great.

From women’s suffrage to Civil Rights for African Americans, to the environment, and the gay and lesbian liberation movement, the American Left has achieved notable successes in the 20th and 21st centuries. Sometimes celebrated and sometimes reviled, the Left has taken on many forms and reinvented itself many times over the past century. In All-American Rebellion, historian Robert Cottrell traces the rise and fall, ebb and flow of left-wing American movements. Following an overview of early 20th century movements, Cottrell focuses on the 1960s to today, offering readers a concise introduction and helping them to understand the political and ideological roots of the Left today. Cottrell includes chapters on the most recent versions of the American left, discussing community organizing, gay liberation, the women’s movement, the Campaign for Economic Democracy, the nuclear freeze movement, opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America, the anti-WTO campaign, Code Pink, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and more. The demand for and support of democracy and the quest for empowerment in various guises unifies these different lefts to one another and to the general unfolding of American history. Cottrell argues that democratic engagement has proven inconsistent and at times outright contradictory. The Left has been most successful when it fully embraces a democratic vision.

A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865 (originally published in 1887) by pioneer African American historian George Washington Williams remains a classic text in African American literature and Civil War history. In this powerful narrative, Williams, who served in the U.S. Colored Troops, tells the battle experiences of the almost 200,000 black men who fought for the Union cause. Determined to document the contributions of his fellow black soldiers, and to underscore the valor and manhood of his race, Williams gathered his material from the official records of U.S. and foreign governments, and from the orderly books and personal recollections of officerscommanding Negro troops during the American Civil War. The new edition of this important text includes an introductory essay by the award-winning historian John David Smith. In his essay, Smith narrates and evaluates the book's contents, analyzes its reception by contemporary critics, and evaluates Williams's work within the context of its day and its place in current historiography.

From the late nineteenth century until World War I, a group of Columbia University students gathered under the mentorship of the renowned historian William Archibald Dunning (1857--1922). Known as the Dunning School, these students wrote the first generation of state studies on the Reconstruction -- volumes that generally sympathized with white southerners, interpreted radical Reconstruction as a mean-spirited usurpation of federal power, and cast the Republican Party as a coalition of carpetbaggers, freedmen, scalawags, and former Unionists. Edited by the award-winning historian John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, The Dunning School focuses on this controversial group of historians and its scholarly output. Despite their methodological limitations and racial bias, the Dunning historians' writings prefigured the sources and questions that later historians of the Reconstruction would utilize and address. Many of their pioneering dissertations remain important to ongoing debates on the broad meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the evolution of American historical scholarship. This groundbreaking collection of original essays offers a fair and critical assessment of the Dunning School that focuses on the group's purpose, the strengths and weaknesses of its constituents, and its legacy. Squaring the past with the present, this important book also explores the evolution of historical interpretations over time and illuminates the ways in which contemporary political, racial, and social questions shape historical analyses.

Ella Josephine Baker (1903-1986) was among the most influential strategists of the most important social movement in modern US history, the Civil Rights Movement, yet most Americans have never heard of her. Behind the scenes, she organized on behalf of the major civil rights organizations of her day—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—among many other activist groups. As she once told an interviewer, “[Y]ou didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put pieces together out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.” Rejecting charismatic leadership as a means of social change, Baker invented a form of grassroots community organizing for social justice that had a profound impact on the struggle for civil rights and continues to inspire agents of change on behalf of a wide variety of social issues. In this book, historian J. Todd Moye masterfully reconstructs Baker’s life and contribution for a new generation of readers. Those who despair that the civil rights story is told too often from the top down and at the dearth of accessible works on women who helped shape the movement will welcome this new addition to the Library of African American Biography series, designed to provide concise, readable, and up-to-date lives of leading black figures in American history.

Slavery in Mississippi, first published in 1933, is a deeply researched and tightly argued social and economic study of slave life in Mississippi by Charles S. Sydnor (1898-1954). Inspired by Ulrich B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), Sydnor strived to test Phillips's contention that slavery was simultaneously a benign institution for African American slaves and an unprofitable one for their masters. Sydnor included path-breaking chapters on such broad scholarly topics as slave labour, slave trading, and the profitability of slavery, but he also examined in depth slave clothing, food, shelter, physical and social care, police control, slave fugitives, and punishments and rewards. More thorough than many previous historians, Sydnor examined how slavery ""worked"" as a social and economic system--how slaves actually lived, how planters bought, cared for, controlled, hired out, and sold their human property. Historian John David Smith's new introduction to this Southern Classic edition frames the original text within the scholarship on slavery in the interwar years, presents its arguments, chronicles its reception by white and black critics, and highlights the ongoing debates about slavery, especially on the profitability of slavery and the conditions of slave life sparked by Sydnor's influential book.

A leading proponent of racial equality in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, Albion W. Tourg?e (1838--1905) served as the most articulate spokesman of the radical wing of the Republican party, and he continued to advocate for its egalitarian ideals long after Reconstruction ended. Undaunted Radical presents Tourg?e's most significant letters, speeches, and essays from the commencement of Radical Reconstruction through the bleak days of the era of Jim Crow.

An Ohioan by birth, Tourg?e served in the Union army and afterwards moved to North Carolina, where he helped draft the 1868 state constitution. Within that and other documents he proposed free public education, the abolition of whipping posts, the end of property qualifications for jury duty and office holding, and the initiation of judicial reform and uniform taxation. Tourg?e also served as a Republican-installed superior court judge, a position that brought him into increasing conflict with the Ku Klux Klan. In 1879, he published A Fool's Errand, a bestselling novel based on his Reconstruction experiences. Although now often overlooked, Tourg?e in his lifetime offered a prominent voice of reason amid the segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, racial propaganda, and mythologies about African Americans that haunted Reconstruction-era society and Gilded Age politics.

These thirty-four documents elaborate the reformer's opinions on the Reconstruction Amendments, his generation's racial and economic theories, the cultural politics of North-South reconciliation, the ethics of corporate capitalism, the Social Gospel movement, and the philosophical underpinnings of American democratic citizenship. Mark Elliott and John David Smith, among the foremost authorities on Tourg?e, have brought these writings, including the previously unpublished oral arguments Tourg?e delivered before the U.S. Supreme Court as Homer Plessy's lead attorney in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), together in one volume.

The book also includes an introductory overview of Tourg?e's life and an exhaustive bibliography of Tourg?e's writings and related works, providing an essential collection for anyone studying Reconstruction and the early civil rights movement.

The Wild East explores the social, political, and environmental changes in the Great Smoky Mountains during the 19th and 20th centuries. Although this national park is most often portrayed as a triumph of wilderness preservation, Margaret Lynn Brown concludes that the largest forested region in the eastern United States is actually a re-created wilderness -- a product of restoration and even manipulation of the land.

Between 1910 and 1920, corporate lumbermen built railroads into the most remote watersheds and removed more than 60 percent of the old-growth forest. During the 1930s, landscape architects and Civilian Conservation Corps workers transformed the Smokies, building trails, campgrounds, and facilities that memorialized the rustic ideals of Roosevelt-style conservation. With the advent of the 1950s, enthusiasm for the national park system boomed again; cultural interpreters went to work. During the 1960s, however, wilderness advocates began lobbying for a more natural-looking landscape.

In the 1970s, Brown writes, the Smokies faced many of the consequences of these management decisions. Major crises pushed park officials toward a greater regard for ecology and scientists trained during the environmental movement foraged through the land's history and sought to re-create the look of the landscape before human settlement. Park management continues to waffle between these shifting views of wilderness, negotiating the often contradictory mission of promoting tourism and ensuring preservation.

William Hannibal Thomas (1843-1935) served with distinction in the U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War (in which he lost an arm) and was a preacher, teacher, lawyer, state legislator, and journalist following Appomattox. In many publications up through the 1890s, Thomas espoused a critical though optimistic black nationalist ideology. After his mid-twenties, however, Thomas began exhibiting a self-destructive personality, one that kept him in constant trouble with authorities and always on the run. His book The American Negro (1901) was his final self-destructive act. Attacking African Americans in gross and insulting language in this utterly pessimistic book, Thomas blamed them for the contemporary "Negro problem" and argued that the race required radical redemption based on improved "character," not changed "color." Vague in his recommendations, Thomas implied that blacks should model themselves after certain mulattoes, most notably William Hannibal Thomas. Black Judas is a biography of Thomas, a publishing history of The American Negro, and an analysis of that book's significance to American racial thought. The book is based on fifteen years of research, including research in postamputation trauma and psychoanalytic theory on selfhatred, to assess Thomas's metamorphosis from a constructive race critic to a black Negrophobe. John David Smith argues that his radical shift resulted from key emotional and physical traumas that mirrored Thomas's life history of exposure to white racism and intense physical pain.

This early work by the esteemed historian Charles P. Roland draws from an abundance of primary sources to describe how the Civil War brought south Louisiana's sugarcane industry to the brink of extinction, and disaster to the lives of civilians both black and white. A gifted raconteur, Roland sets the scene where the Louisiana cane country formed ""a favoured and colourful part of the Old South,"" and then unfolds the series of events that changed it forever: secession, blockade, invasion, occupation, emancipation, and defeat. Though sugarcane survived, production did not match prewar levels for twenty-five years. Roland's approach is both illustrative of an earlier era and remarkably seminal to current emancipation studies. He displays sympathy for plantation owners' losses, but he considers as well the sufferings of women, slaves, and freedmen, yielding a rich study of the social, cultural, economic, and agricultural facets of Louisiana's sugar plantations during the Civil War.

In 1988 Greenwood Press published the "Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery" to wide acclaim by the library community and scholars in the field. The "Dictionary" was issued at a time when the study of slavery commanded a central place in American historical thinking and, increasingly, in a host of other disciplines as well. Interest in slavery has not abated. Yet, despite a growing sophistication in methodology and complexity of analysis, the basic contours of the study of slavery remain much the same as when the "Dictionary" first appeared. To take the latest scholarship into account, the editors have added a new introduction surveying the principal themes in research and writing over the past decade and have appended a bibliography, arranged by broad thematic areas keyed to topics treated in the text.

In 1988 Greenwood Press published the "Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery" to wide acclaim by the library community and scholars in the field. It was selected as a Best Reference Book by "Library Journal," a "Choice" Outstanding Academic Book, and an American Library Association Outstanding Reference Book. Historian John Hope Franklin declared it an indispensable tool for all students of human bondage, while the "Journal of the Early Republic" announced it has something for everyone interested in Afro-American slavery, from the general reader to undergraduate student to professional historian.

The "Dictionary" appeared at a time when the study of slavery commanded a central place in American historical thinking and, increasingly, in a host of other disciplines as well. Interest in slavery has not abated. Yet, despite a growing sophistication in methodology and complexity of analysis, the basic contours of the study remain much the same as when the "Dictionary" was first issued. To take the latest scholarship into account, the editors have appended a bibliography, arranged by broad thematic areas keyed to topics treated in the text. The bibliography, augmented by the historiographical review of the scholarship of the last decade, makes the "Dictionary" an invaluable guide for students and scholars alike.

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877 -1934) established a reputation as one of the early twentieth century's foremost authorities on the history of African American slavery and the Old South. An empiricist, Phillips approached his subjects analytically and dispassionately, and his scholarship shaped historical investigation of the South for decades. Phillips was an empiricist and based his writing on an array of primary sources, including a growing collection of photographs he accumulated during his research. These images of plantation crops and machinery, agricultural scenes, distinctive architecture, white southerners, and former slaves and their descendants collectively record much about the life and labor in the rural South three decades before the Farm Security Administration undertook its own documentary projects during the New Deal.
In Seeing the New South, photography historian Patricia Bixel and Phillips scholar and historian John David Smith delve into the visual record Phillips left behind, publishing many of these photographs for the first time and integrating his photographic archive with his research and teachings on the history of the South. For example, his Life and Labor in the Old South, published in 1929, was well illustrated with useful photographs. The bulk of Phillips's papers resides in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. The collection includes sixty lantern slides and many photographic prints that Phillips employed in his work. Bixel and Smith uncovered another five hundred images that greatly expanded Phillips's visual archive. Taken between 1904 and 1930, these images provide glimpses of a Southern landscape rarely seen and even more rarely photographed, offering a striking visual account of early-twentieth-century life in the rural South.
Phillips deliberately sought out images of buildings and agricultural scenes emblematic of the South, representative portraits of white and black southerners, and distinctive depictions of farm and town life. Some photographs reinforce Phillips's arguments about the general backwardness of an impoverished rural South and about the limitations of the region's agricultural and industrial economies. But his images also documented active independent black and white communities with diverse economic practices and subcultures. This first-ever collection of Phillips's photographs provides dramatic documentation of economic and social life during an era seldom captured on film, yielding striking visual portraits of human dignity in black and white.

"The great value of the book lies in the manner in which May relates the expansionist urge to the "symbolic" differences emerging between the North and the South. The result is a balanced account that contributes to the efforts of historians to understand the causes of the Civil War."--"Journal of American History" "The most ambitious effort yet to relate the Caribbean question to the larger picture of southern economic and political anxieties, and to secession. The core of this superbly documented book is a detailed description of expansionist ideology and activities during the 1850s."--"Civil War History" A path-breaking work when first published in 1973, "The Southern Dream" remains the standard work on attempts by the South to spread American slavery into the tropics--Cuba, Mexico, and Central America in particular--before the Civil War. Robert May shows that the South's expansionists had no more success than when they tried to extend slavery westward. As one after another of their plots failed, southern imperialists lost hope that their labor system might survive in the Union. Blaming northern Democrats and antislavery Republicans alike for their disappointed dreams, alienated southerners embraced secession as an alternative means to achieving the tropical slave empire that they craved. Had war not erupted at Fort Sumter, Confederates might have attempted to conquer the Caribbean basin.May's book serves as an important reminder that foreign policy cannot be divorced from the writing of American history, even in regard to seemingly domestic matters like the causes of the Civil War. Contending that America's Manifest Destiny became "sectionalized" in the 1850s, he explains why southerners considered Caribbean expansion so important and shows how southerners used their clout in Washington to initiate diplomatic schemes like the notorious Ostend Manifesto and presidential attempts to buy the slaveholding island of Cuba from Spain. He also describes southern filibustering plots against Latin American domains, such as the aborted designs on Mexico of the colorful Knights of the Golden Circle and the actual invasions of Central America by native Tennessean William Walker. Walker struck a major blow for the expansion of slavery when he legalized it during his occupation of Nicaragua. Most important, May relates how Caribbean plots affected American public opinion and ignited sectional friction in congressional debates. May argues that President-elect Abraham Lincoln might have saved the Union in the winter of 1860-61, had he agreed to last minute concessions facilitating slavery's future expansion towards the tropics.May's fascinating and often surprising account internationalized the causes of the Civil War. It should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the complex reasons why Americans came to blows with each other in 1861. This reprinting features a new preface by the author, which addresses the latest research on the Caribbean question. Robert E. May is professor of history at Purdue University.

"An Old Creed for the New South: " "Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918" details the slavery debate from the Civil War through World War I. Award-winning historian John David Smith argues that African American slavery remained a salient metaphor for how Americans interpreted contemporary race relations decades after the Civil War. Smith draws extensively on postwar articles, books, diaries, manuscripts, newspapers, and speeches to counter the belief that debates over slavery ended with emancipation. After the Civil War, Americans in both the North and the South continued to debate slavery's merits as a labor, legal, and educational system and as a mode of racial control. The study details how white Southerners continued to tout slavery as beneficial for both races long after Confederate defeat. During Reconstruction and after Redemption, Southerners continued to refine proslavery ideas while subjecting blacks to new legal, extralegal, and social controls. "An Old Creed for the New South" links pre- and post-Civil War racial thought, showing historical continuity, and treats the Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws in new ways, connecting these important racial and legal themes to intellectual and social history. Although many blacks and some whites denounced slavery as the source of the contemporary "Negro problem," most whites, including late nineteenth-century historians, championed a "new" proslavery argument. The study also traces how historian Ulrich B. Phillips and Progressive Era scholars looked at slavery as a golden age of American race relations and shows how a broad range of African Americans, including Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, responded to theproslavery argument. Such ideas, Smith posits, provided a powerful racial creed for the New South.This examination of black slavery in the American public mind--which includes the arguments of former slaves, slaveholders, Freedmen's Bureau agents, novelists, and essayists--demonstrates that proslavery ideology dominated racial thought among white southerners, and most white northerners, in the five decades following the Civil War.

Inspired and informed by the latest research in African American, military, and social history, the fourteen original essays in this book tell the stories of the African American soldiers who fought for the Union cause, Collectively, these essays probe the broad military, political, and social significance of black soldiers' armed service, enriching our understanding of the Civil War and African American life during and after the conflict. The contributors are Anne J. Bailey, Arthur W. Bergeron Jr., John Cimprich, Lawrence Lee Hewitt, Richard Lowe, Thomas D. Mays, Michael T. Meier, Edwin S. Redkey, Richard Reid, William Glenn Robertson, John David Smith, Noah Andre Trudeau, Keith Wilson, and Robert J. Zalimas Jr.

Dear Delia chronicles the story of Henry F. Young, an officer in the famed Iron Brigade, as told through 155 letters home. His insights, often poignant and powerful, enable readers to witness the Civil War as he did. Young covers innumerable details of military service-from the camaraderie, pettiness, and thievery he witnessed among the troops, to the brutality of internecine war. He was an equally astute observer of the military leadership, maneuvers and tactics, rumored troop movements, and what he considered the strengths and weaknesses of African American soldiers. From newspapers, he retained a firm grasp of Wisconsin and national politics, often noting incidents of graft and corruption and offering pointed opinions regarding the 1864 presidential election. Above all, Young's communications highlight his unflagging patriotism-his fierce determination to preserve the Union no matter the cost. Candid, contemplative, thorough, and occasionally humorous, Young provides a clear window into everyday events as well as into war, society, and politics. Civil War enthusiasts will appreciate this correspondence, as it reveals the perspective of a young officer from America's western heartland, a regional viewpoint generally omitted from Civil War-era documentary projects.