Glenn Feldman – författare

Has the South, once the ""Solid South"" of the Democratic Party, truly become an unassailable Republican stronghold? If so, when, where, why, and how did this seismic change occur? Moreover, what are the implications for the U.S. body politic?Painting Dixie Red is the first volume to grapple with these difficult yet critical questions. In this fascinating and timely collection, a distinguished group of scholars engages in an enlightening debate. Some make the case that the South has become Republican, and some contend that it has not. Some outline the region's exceptionalism, and some reject the idea of regional distinctiveness. Some point to white discontent over civil rights as the root of political changes, and some cite color-blind factors. All offer invaluable insights into U.S. politics during these ultra-partisan times.

Nation within a Nation features cutting-edge work by lead scholars in the fields of history, political science, and human geography, who examine the causes--realand perceived--for the South's perpetual state of rebellion, which remains oneof its most defining characteristics.

This first book-length examination of the Klan in Alabama represents exhaustive research that challenges traditional interpretations. The Ku Klux Klan has wielded considerable power both as a terrorist group and as a political force. Usually viewed as appearing in distinct incarnations, the Klans of the 20th century are now shown by Glenn Feldman to have a greater degree of continuity than has been previously suspected. Victims of Klan terrorism continued to be aliens, foreigners, or outsiders in Alabama: the freed slave during Reconstruction, the 1920s Catholic or Jew, the 1930s labor organizer or Communist, and the returning black veteran of World War II were all considered a threat to the dominant white culture. Feldman offers new insights into this 'qualified continuity' among Klans of different eras, showing that the group remained active during the 1930s and 1940s when it was presumed dormant, with elements of the 'Reconstruction syndrome' carrying over to the smaller Klan of the civil rights era. In addition, Feldman takes a critical look at opposition to Klan activities by southern elites. He particularly shows how opponents during the Great Depression and war years saw the Klan as an impediment to attracting outside capital and federal relief or as a magnet for federal action that would jeopardize traditional forms of racial and social control. Other critics voiced concerns about negative national publicity, and others deplored the violence and terrorism. This in-depth examination of the Klan in a single state, which features rare photographs, provides a means of understanding the order's development throughout the South. Feldman's book represents definitive research into the history of the Klan and makes a major contribution to our understanding of both that organization and the history of Alabama.

Historian Glenn Feldman gathers together a group of essays that examine the efforts of important scholars to discuss and define the South's distinctiveness. The volume includes 18 chapters on such notable historians as John Hope Franklin, Anne Firor Scott, Frank L. Owsley, W. J. Cash, and C. Vann Woodward, written by 19 different researchers, both senior historians and emerging scholars, including Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, John Shelton Reed, Bruce Clayton, and Ted Ownby. The essays examine the major work or works of each scholar under consideration as well as that scholar's overall contribution to the study of southern history. Reading Southern History will enlighten readers on the more compelling themes currently and traditionally explored by southern historians. It will appeal greatly to professors and students as a valuable multidisciplinary introduction to the study of southern history, since several of the essays are on scholars who are working outside the discipline of history proper, in the fields of political science, sociology, journalism, and economics.Feldman's collection, therefore, sheds light on a broad spectrum of themes important in southern history, including the plight of poor whites, race, debates over race and class, the "reconstruction syndrome," continuity versus discontinuity in relation to blacks and whites, and regional culture and distinctiveness. Reading Southern History will be valuable to students and scholars of women's studies, African American history, working-class history, and ethnic studies, as well as traditional southern history. Most important, the publication makes a significant contribution to the development and ongoing study of the historiography of the South.

The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Road to America’s New Conservatism is the second book in Glenn Feldman’s groundbreaking series on how the American South switched its allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party in the twentieth century.Audacious in its scope, subtle in its analysis, and persuasive in its argu­ments, The Great Melding is the second book in Glenn Feldman’s mag­isterial recounting of the South’s monumental transformation from a Reconstruction-era citadel of Democratic Party inertia to a cauldron of GOP agitation. In this pioneering study, he shows how the transitional years after World War II, the Dixiecrat episode, and the early 1950s formed a pivotal sequence of events that altered America’s political landscape in profound, fundamental, and unexpected ways.Feldman’s landmark The Irony of the Solid South dismantled the myth of the New Deal consensus, proving it to be only a fleeting alliance of fissiparous factions; The Great Melding further examines how the South broke away from that consensus. Exploring the role of race and white supremacy, Feldman documents and explains the roles of econom­ics, religion, and emotive appeals to patriotism in southern voting patterns. His probing and original analysis includes a discussion of the limits of southern liberalism and a fresh examination of the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948.Feldman convincingly argues that the Dixiecrats—often dismissed as a transitory footnote in American politics—served as a template for the modern conservative movement. Now a predictably conserva­tive stronghold, Alabama at the time was viewed by national political strategists as a battleground and bellwether. Masterfully synthesizing a vast range of sources, Feldman shows that Alabama, far from being predictable, was one of the few states where voters chose between the competing ideologies of the Democrats, Republicans, and Dixiecrats.Writing in his lively and provocative style, Feldman demonstrates that the events he recounts in Alabama between 1942 and Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 election encapsulate a rare moment of fluidity in American politics, one in which the New Deal consensus shattered and the Democratic and Republican parties fought off a third-party revolt only to find themselves irrevocably altered by their success. The Great Melding will fascinate historians, political scientists, political strategists, and readers of political non-fiction.

Before Brown details the ferment in civil rights that took place across the South before the momentous Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. This collection refutes the notion that the movement began with the Supreme Court decision, and suggests, rather, that the movement originated in the 1930s and earlier, spurred by the Great Depression and, later, World War II—events that would radically shape the course of politics in the South and the nation into the next century. This work explores the growth of the movement through its various manifestations—the activities of politicians, civil rights leaders, religious figures, labor unionists, and grass-roots activists—throughout the 1940s and 1950s. It discusses the critical leadership roles played by women and offers a new perspective on the relationship between the NAACP and the Communist Party. Before Brown shows clearly that, as the drive toward racial equality advanced and national political attitudes shifted, the validity of white supremacy came increasingly into question. Institutionalized racism in the South had always offered white citizens material advantages by preserving their economic superiority and making them feel part of a privileged class. When these rewards were threatened by the civil rights movement, a white backlash occurred. ""A valuable and timely volume . . . particularly welcome for the emphasis it places on the churches, on white women, and on returning black and white veterans, groups whose postwar role has been too long ignored."" —Tony Badger, author of The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940 and editor of, with Brian Ward, The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement Glenn Feldman is Associate Professor of Business in the Center for Labor Education and Research at The University of Alabama at Birmingham and author of Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949. Patricia Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and author of Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era.