Thirty-six years before Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and southern Mississippi, the region was visited by one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the United States: Camille.

Mark M. Smith offers three highly original histories of the storm's impact in southern Mississippi. In the first essay Smith examines the sensory experience and impact of the hurricane--how the storm rearranged and challenged residents' senses of smell, sight, sound, touch, and taste. The second essay explains the way key federal officials linked the question of hurricane relief and the desegregation of Mississippi's public schools. Smith concludes by considering the political economy of short- and long-term disaster recovery, returning to issues of race and class.

"Camille, 1969" offers stories of survival and experience, of the tenacity of social justice in the face of a natural disaster, and of how recovery from Camille worked for some but did not work for others. Throughout these essays are lessons about how we might learn from the past in planning for recovery from natural disasters in the future.

This book can be purchased by customers in the US or Canada from the University of California Press.Sensory History introduces a topic that is rapidly becoming of enormous interest to historians - incorporating the senses into our understanding of the past.The book defines "sensory history," stresses the importance of historicizing the senses, and considers each sense chapter by chapter. The author concludes by pondering future directions of the field.Drawing on examples from across the globe throughout time, Sensory History includes examinations of visual culture in Victorian Britain and South America, of sound in nineteenth-century Australia and France, and of gender politics and touch in Early Modern Europe and among Native Americans. It also discusses "race" and olfaction in the United States, scent in ancient Christianity, and the role of taste in shaping national identity in modern China and Early America. By attending carefully to the social history of the senses, Sensory History also reconsiders the value of paradigmatic explanatory models linking print, vision and modernity, and evaluates their relevance to the study of sensory history.Sensory History will be a key text for an emerging field.

Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 with devastating consequences. Almost all analyses of the disaster have been dedicated to the way the hurricane affected New Orleans. This volume examines the impact of Katrina on southern Mississippi. While communities along Mississippi's Gulf Coast shared the impact, their socioeconomic and demographic compositions varied widely, leading to different types and rates of recovery. This volume furthers our understanding of the pace of recovery and its geographic extent, and explores the role of inequalities in the recovery process and those antecedent conditions that could give rise to a 'recovery divide'. It will be especially appealing to researchers and advanced students of natural disasters and policy makers dealing with disaster consequences and recovery.

From the founding of Jamestown to the American Civil War, slavery and abolition shaped American national, regional and racial identities. This four-volume reset edition draws together rare sources relating to American slavery systems.

From the founding of Jamestown to the American Civil War, slavery and abolition shaped American national, regional and racial identities. This four-volume reset edition draws together rare sources relating to American slavery systems.

From the founding of Jamestown to the American Civil War, slavery and abolition shaped American national, regional and racial identities. This four-volume reset edition draws together rare sources relating to American slavery systems.

From the founding of Jamestown to the American Civil War, slavery and abolition shaped American national, regional and racial identities. This four-volume reset edition draws together rare sources relating to American slavery systems.

Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 with devastating consequences. Almost all analyses of the disaster have been dedicated to the way the hurricane affected New Orleans. This volume examines the impact of Katrina on southern Mississippi. While communities along Mississippi's Gulf Coast shared the impact, their socioeconomic and demographic compositions varied widely, leading to different types and rates of recovery. This volume furthers our understanding of the pace of recovery and its geographic extent, and explores the role of inequalities in the recovery process and those antecedent conditions that could give rise to a 'recovery divide'. It will be especially appealing to researchers and advanced students of natural disasters and policy makers dealing with disaster consequences and recovery.

Even while slavery existed, Americans debated slavery. Was it a profitable and healthy institution? If so, for whom? The abolition of slavery in 1865 did not end this debate, and it still remains among the most hotly disputed topics in American history. Smith outlines the main contours of this debate, summarizes the contending viewpoints, and weighs the relative importance, strengths and weaknesses of the various interpretations. This book introduces an important topic in American history in a manner that is accessible to students.

Even while slavery existed, Americans debated slavery. Was it a profitable and healthy institution? If so, for whom? The abolition of slavery in 1865 did not end this debate. Similar questions concerning the profitability of slavery, its impact on masters, slaves, and nonslaveowners still inform modern historical debates. Is the slave South best characterized as a capitalist society? Or did its dogged adherence to non-wage labor render it precapitalist? Today, southern slavery is among the most hotly disputed topics in writing on American history. With the use of illustrative material and a critical bibliography, Dr Smith outlines the main contours of this complex debate, summarizes the contending viewpoints, and at the same time weighs up the relative importance, strengths and weaknesses of the various competing interpretations. This book introduces an important topic in American history in a manner which is accessible to students and undergraduates taking courses in American history.

Smell and History collects many of the most important recent essays on the history of scent, aromas, perfumes, and ways of smelling. With an introduction by Mark M. Smith-one of the leading social and cultural historians at work today and the preeminent champion in the United States of the emerging field of sensory history-the volume introduces to undergraduate and graduate students as well as to historians of all fields the richness, relevance, and insightfulness of the olfactory to historical study. Ranging from antiquity to the present, these ten essays, most of them published since 2003, consider how olfaction and scent have shaped the history of medicine, gender, race-making, class formation, religion, urbanization, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization; how habits and practices of smelling informed ideas about the Enlightenment, modernity, and memory; how smell shaped perceptions of progress and civilization; and how people throughout history have used smell as a way to organize categories and inform worldviews.

Historical accounts of major events have almost always relied upon what those who were there witnessed. Nowhere is this truer than in the nerve-shattering chaos of warfare, where sight seems to confer objective truth and acts as the basis of reconstruction. In The Smell of Battle, the Taste ofSiege, historian Mark M. Smith considers how all five senses, including sight, shaped the experience of the Civil War and thus its memory, exploring its full sensory impact on everyone from the soldiers on the field to the civilians waiting at home.
From the eardrum-shattering barrage of shells announcing the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter; to the stench produced by the corpses lying in the mid-summer sun at Gettysburg; to the siege of Vicksburg, once a center of Southern culinary aesthetics and starved into submission, Smith recreates how Civil War was felt and lived. Relying on first-hand accounts, Smith focuses on specific senses, one for each event, offering a wholly new perspective. At Bull Run, the similarities between the colors of the Union and Confederate uniforms created concern over what later would be called "friendly fire" and helped decide the outcome of the first major battle, simply because no one was quite sure they could believe their eyes. He evokes what it might have felt like to be in the HL Hunley submarine, in which eight men worked cheek by jowl in near-total darkness in a space 48 inches high, 42 inches wide. Often argued to be the first "total war," the Civil War overwhelmed the senses because of its unprecedented nature and scope, rendering sight less reliable and, Smith shows, forcefully engaging the nonvisual senses. Sherman's March was little less than a full-blown assault on Southern sense and sensibility, leaving nothing untouched an no one unaffected.
Unique, compelling, and fascinating, The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege, offers readers way to experience the Civil War with fresh eyes.

The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas offers penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World. With essays on colonial and antebellum America, Brazil, the Caribbean, the Indies, and South America, the Handbook has impressive geographic and temporal coverage. It also includes a generous range of thematic essays on comparative slavery, the economics of slavery, historical methodology in the field, slavery and the law, for instance. While obviously indebted to the foundational works of the 1960s and 1970s, current writing on the history of slavery and forms of unfree labor in the Americas has taken decidedly original, new, often ingenious turns. A younger generation of scholars has shown a healthy respect for that tradition while posing new, often interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed questions, considering, for example, the nature and definition of slave resistance in the Americas, evolving meanings of gender and race under slavery, the complicated nature of class formation in unfree societies, the elaboration of proslavery and antislavery ideologies, the origins and subsequent elaboration of race-based slavery, and mechanisms of emancipation. Written by an international team including some of the field's most eminent historians and the most innovative younger scholars working today, The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas seeks to explain the enduring importance of the earlier historiography, identify current trends and developments, and offer suggestive but informed commentary on future developments in the field for a global scholarly audience.

A celebrated social history, ""Life and Labor in the Old South"" (1929) represents the culmination of three decades of research and reflection on the social and economic systems of the antebellum South by a leading historian of the first half of the twentieth century. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877-1934) sought to include populations neglected in earlier scholarship as a means of underscoring the region's complex diversity and the importance of human interaction. Deeply researched in primary sources, carefully focused on social and economic facets of slavery, and gracefully written, Phillips' germinal account set the standard for his contemporaries. Simultaneously the work is rife with elitism, racism, and reliance on sources that privilege white perspectives. Such contradictions between its content and viewpoint have earned this study its place at the forefront of texts in the historiography of the antebellum South and African American slavery. This edition includes a new introduction by John David Smith that frames the volume within Progressive Era scholarship, chronicles its critical reception, and highlights its influence on contemporary historical debates.

A Sensory History Manifesto is a brief and timely meditation on the state of the field. It invites historians who are unfamiliar with sensory history to adopt some of its insights and practices, and it urges current practitioners to think in new ways about writing histories of the senses. Starting from the premise that the sensorium is a historical formation, Mark M. Smith traces the origins of historical work on the senses long before the emergence of the field now called “sensory history,” interrogating, exploring, and in some cases recovering pioneering work on the topic. Smith argues that we are at an important moment in the writing of the history of the senses, and he explains the potential that this field holds for the study of history generally. In addition to highlighting the strengths of current work in sensory history, Smith also identifies some of its shortcomings. If sensory history provides historians of all persuasions, times, and places a useful and incisive way to write about the past, it also challenges current practitioners to think more carefully about the historicity of the senses and the desirability—even the urgency—of engaged and sustained debate among themselves. In this way, A Sensory History Manifesto invites scholars to think about how their field needs to evolve if the real interpretive dividends of sensory history are to be realized. Concise and convincing, A Sensory History Manifesto is a must-read for historians of all specializations.

A Sensory History Manifesto is a brief and timely meditation on the state of the field. It invites historians who are unfamiliar with sensory history to adopt some of its insights and practices, and it urges current practitioners to think in new ways about writing histories of the senses. Starting from the premise that the sensorium is a historical formation, Mark M. Smith traces the origins of historical work on the senses long before the emergence of the field now called “sensory history,” interrogating, exploring, and in some cases recovering pioneering work on the topic. Smith argues that we are at an important moment in the writing of the history of the senses, and he explains the potential that this field holds for the study of history generally. In addition to highlighting the strengths of current work in sensory history, Smith also identifies some of its shortcomings. If sensory history provides historians of all persuasions, times, and places a useful and incisive way to write about the past, it also challenges current practitioners to think more carefully about the historicity of the senses and the desirability—even the urgency—of engaged and sustained debate among themselves. In this way, A Sensory History Manifesto invites scholars to think about how their field needs to evolve if the real interpretive dividends of sensory history are to be realized. Concise and convincing, A Sensory History Manifesto is a must-read for historians of all specializations.

The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas offers penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World. With essays on colonial and antebellum America, Brazil, the Caribbean, the Indies, and South America, the Handbook has impressive geographic and temporal coverage. It also includes a generous range of thematic essays on comparative slavery, the economics of slavery, historical methodology in the field, slavery and the law, for instance.
While obviously indebted to the foundational works of the 1960s and 1970s, current writing on the history of slavery and forms of unfree labor in the Americas has taken decidedly original, new, often ingenious turns. A younger generation of scholars has shown a healthy respect for that tradition while posing new, often interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed questions, considering, for example, the nature and definition of slave resistance in the Americas, evolving meanings of gender and race under slavery, the complicated nature of class formation in unfree societies, the elaboration of proslavery and antislavery ideologies, the origins and subsequent elaboration of race-based slavery, and mechanisms of emancipation.
Written by an international team including some of the field's most eminent historians and the most innovative younger scholars working today, The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas seeks to explain the enduring importance of the earlier historiography, identify current trends and developments, and offer suggestive but informed commentary on future developments in the field for a global scholarly audience.

This is a compendium of Southern witticisms by the Confederacy's most famous humorist. First published in 1873 Bill Arp's ""Peace Papers"" collects some of the Southern humorist's best writings from the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Charles Henry Smith (1826-1903), a lawyer in Rome, Georgia, took the penname 'Bill Arp' following the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, when he wrote a satiric response to Abraham Lincoln's proclamation ordering the Southern rebels to disperse. In his letter addressed to 'Mister Linkhorn' and written in a semiliterate backwoods dialect, Smith advised the president, 'I tried my darndest yesterday to disperse and retire...but it was no go'. The 'Linkhorn' letter was reprinted in many Southern newspapers, and Smith followed it with dozens of other similarly comic pieces, all signed by 'Bill Arp'. During the war he mocked Lincoln and praised the bravery and sacrifice of the Confederates, but he also turned a disapproving eye on those Southerners - from draft dodgers to Georgia governor Joe Brown - whose actions he viewed as detrimental to the war effort. Afterward he turned his attention to criticizing Reconstruction efforts. This Southern Classics edition makes Smith's witticisms as Arp available once more, augmented with a new introduction by David B. Parker, which places the writings and their author in historical and literary context.

First published in 1939, McGillivray of the Creeks is a unique mix of primary and secondary sources for the study of American Indian history in the Southeast. The historian John Walton Caughey's brief but definitive biography of Creek leader Alexander McGillivray (1750-1793) is coupled with 214 letters between McGillivray and Spanish and American political officials. The volume offers distinctive firsthand insights into Creek and Euroamerican diplomacy in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi in the aftermath of the American Revolution as well as a glimpse into how historians have viewed the controversial Creek leader. McGillivray, the son of a famous Scottish Indian trader and a Muskogee Creek woman, was educated in Charleston, South Carolina, and, with his father's guidance, took up the mantle of negotiator for the Creek people during and after the Revolution. While much of eighteenth-century American Indian history relies on accounts written by non-Indians, the letters reprinted in this volume provide a valuable Indian perspective into Creek diplomatic negotiations with the Americans and the Spanish in the American South. Crafty and literate, McGillivray's letters reveal his willingness to play American and Spanish interests against one another. Whether he was motivated solely by a devotion to his native people or by the advancement of his own ambitions is the subject of much historical debate.

Sound, sectionalism, and the coming of the Civil War; Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern or southern, slave or free - to understand sectionalism and the attitudes toward modernity that led to the Civil War - we must consider how antebellum Americans comprehended the sounds and silences they heard. Smith explores how northerners and southerners perceived the sounds associated with antebellum developments including the market revolution, industrialization, westward expansion, and abolitionism. In northern modernization, southern slaveholders heard the noise of the mob, the din of industrialism, and threats to what they considered their quiet, orderly way of life; in southern slavery, northern abolitionists and capitalists heard the screams of enslaved labor, the silence of oppression, and signals of premodernity that threatened their vision of the American future. Sectional consciousness was profoundly influenced by the sounds people attributed to their regions. And as sectionalism hardened into fierce antagonism, it propelled the nation toward its most earsplitting conflict, the Civil War.

Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners--particularly masters and their slaves--came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival sources, Smith demonstrates that white southern slaveholders began to incorporate this new sense of time in the 1830s. Influenced by colonial merchants' fascination with time thrift, by a long-held familiarity with urban, public time, by the transport and market revolution in the South, and by their own qualified embrace of modernity, slaveowners began to purchase timepieces in growing numbers, adopting a clock-based conception of time and attempting in turn to instill a similar consciousness in their slaves. But, forbidden to own watches themselves, slaves did not internalize this idea to the same degree as their masters, and slaveholders found themselves dependent as much on the whip as on the clock when enforcing slaves' obedience to time. Ironically, Smith shows, freedom largely consolidated the dependence of masters as well as freedpeople on the clock. |From the Ku Klux Klan to Father Coughlin's Christian Front, the first full-length study to examine, compare, and assess the political influence of right-wing extremist groups during the second quarter of the twentieth century.

A sourcebook for understanding an uprising that continues to incite historical debate. In the fall of 1739, as many as one hundred enslaved African and African Americans living within twenty miles of Charleston joined forces to strike down their white owners and march en masse toward Spanish Florida and freedom. More than sixty whites and thirty slaves died in the violence that followed. Among the most important slave revolts in colonial America, the Stono Rebellion also ranks as South Carolina's largest slave insurrection and one of the bloodiest uprisings in American history. Significant for the fear it cast among lowcountry slaveholders and for the repressive slave laws enacted in its wake, Stono continues to attract scholarly attention as a historical event worthy of study and reinterpretation. Edited by Mark M. Smith, ""Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt"" introduces readers to the documents needed to understand both the revolt and the ongoing discussion among scholars about the legacy of the insurrection. Smith has assembled a compendium of materials necessary for an informed examination of the revolt. Primary documents - including some works previously unpublished and largely unknown even to specialists - offer accounts of the violence, discussions of Stono's impact on white sensibilities, and public records relating incidents of the uprising. To these primary sources Smith adds three divergent interpretations that expand on Peter H. Wood's pioneering study Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. Excerpts from works by John K. Thornton, Edward A. Pearson, and Smith himself reveal how historians have used some of the same documents to construct radically different interpretations of the revolt's causes, meaning, and effects.

A memoir of the ambitious life and controversial political career of Louisiana governor Henry Clay Warmoth (1842-1931), ""War, Politics, and Reconstruction"" is a firsthand account of the political and social machinations of Civil War America and the war's aftermath in one of the most volatile states of the defeated Confederacy. An Illinois native, Warmoth arrived in Louisiana in 1864 as part of the federal occupation forces. Upon leaving military service in 1865, he established a legal practice in New Orleans. Taking full advantage of the chaotic times, Warmoth rapidly amassed fortune and influence, and soon emerged as a leader of the state's Republican Party and, in 1868, was elected governor. Amid an administration rife with scandal, the Louisiana Republican Party broke into warring factions. Warmoth survived an impeachment attempt in 1872, but a second attempt in 1873 culminated with his removal from office. This fall from Republican grace stemmed from his allegiance with white conservatives, remnants of the old guard, and staunch opponents of those Republicans who sought a wider political role for African Americans. Never again to hold political office, Warmoth remained in his adopted Louisiana, enjoying the fruits of his investments in plantations and sugar refineries. In 1930, the year before his death, he published ""War, Politics, and Reconstruction"", a vindication of his public life and a rebuttal of his carpetbagger reputation. Despite Warmoth's obvious self-serving biases, the volume offers unparalleled personal insights into the inner workings of Reconstruction government in Louisiana in the words of one of its key architects. A new introduction by John C. Rodrigue places Warmoth's memoir within the broader context of evolving perceptions and historiography of Reconstruction. Rodrigue also offers readers a more balanced portrait of Warmoth by providing supplemental information omitted or slighted by the author in his efforts to cast his actions in the most positive light.

The reissue of The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston makes available for a new generation of readers a firsthand look at one of South Carolina's most influential antebellum dynasties and the institutions of slavery and plantation agriculture upon which it was built. Often cited by historians, Robert F. W. Allston's letters, speeches, receipts, and ledger entries chronicle both the heyday of the rice industry and its precipitate crash during the Civil War. As Daniel C. Littlefield underscores in his introduction to the new edition, these papers are significant not only because of Allston's position at the apex of planter society but also because his views represented those of the rice planter elite. Allston (1801-1864) owned or managed seven plantations along the Pee Dee and Waccamaw rivers, including Chicora Wood, Rose Bank, and Brookgreen, now known as Brookgreen Gardens. A Jeffersonian republican, he served in the South Carolina General Assembly from 1832 until he was elected governor in 1856. After his death in 1864, his daughter Elizabeth Allston Pringle continued the family's rice-growing activities and achieved personal renown as a columnist for the New York Times and author of A Woman Rice Planter. The collection includes letters between Allston and his wife and children, correspondence with politicians, fiscal documents from the operation of his plantations, records related to the sale and care of slaves, and political speeches.