Orville Vernon Burton – författare

This collection of essays, organized around the theme of the struggle for equality in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, also serves to honor the renowned Civil War historian James McPherson. Complete with a brief interview with the celebrated scholar, this volume reflects the best aspects of McPherson’s work, while casting new light on the struggle that has served as the animating force of his lifetime of scholarship. With a chronological span from the 1830s to the 1960s, the contributions bear witness to the continuing vigor of the argument over equality.

Contributors>: Orville Vernon Burton, Clemson University * Tom Carhart, Independent Scholar * Catherine Clinton, Queen''s University Belfast * Thomas C. Cox, University of Southern California * Bruce Dain, University of Utah * John M. Giggie, University of Alabama * Michele Gillespie, Wake Forest University * Joseph T. Glatthaar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill * Brian Greenberg, Monmouth University * James K. Hogue, University of North Carolina, Charlotte * Judith A. Hunter, State University of New York, Geneseo * Ryan P. Jordan, University of San Diego * Philip M. Katz, American Association of Museums * Monroe H. Little, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis * Peyton McCrary, U.S. Department of Justice * Jerald Podair, Lawrence University * Jennifer L. Weber, University of Kansas * Ronald C. White Jr., University of California Los Angeles

No period of United States history is more important and still less understood than Reconstruction. Now, at the sesquicentennial of the Reconstruction era, Vernon Burton and Brent Morris bring together the best new scholarship on the critical years after the Civil War and before the onset of Jim Crow, synthesizing social, political, economic, and cultural approaches to understanding this crucial period.

Reconstruction was the most progressive period in United States history. Although marred by frequent violence and tragedy, it was a revolutionary era that offered hope, opportunity, and against all odds, a new birth of freedom for all Americans. Even though many of the gains of Reconstruction were rolled back and replaced with a repressive social and legal regime for African Americans, the radical spark was never fully extinguished. Its spirit fanned back into flame with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and its ramifications remain palpable to this day.

The Gullah people of St. Helena Island still relate that their people wanted to “catch the learning” after northern abolitionists founded Penn School in 1862, less than six months after the Union army captured the South Carolina sea islands. In this broad history Orville Vernon Burton and Wilbur Cross range across the past 150 years to reacquaint us with the far-reaching impact of a place where many daring and innovative social justice endeavors had their beginnings.Penn Center’s earliest incarnation was as a refuge where escaped and liberated enslaved people could obtain formal liberal arts schooling, even as the Civil War raged on sometimes just miles away. Penn Center then earned a place in the history of education by providing agricultural and industrial arts training for African Americans after Reconstruction and through the Jim Crow era, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Later, during the civil rights movement, Penn Center made history as a safe meeting place for organizations like Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Peace Corps. Today, Penn Center continues to build on its long tradition of leadership in progressive causes. As a social services hub for local residents and as a museum, conference, and education complex, Penn Center is a showcase for activism in such areas as cultural, material, and environmental preservation; economic sustainability; and access to health care and early learning.Here is all of Penn Center’s rich past and present, as told through the experiences of its longtime Gullah inhabitants and countless visitors. Including forty-two extraordinary photographs that show Penn as it was and is now, this book recounts Penn Center''s many achievements and its many challenges, reflected in the momentous events it both experienced and helped to shape.

Distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton suggests that, while abolishing slavery was the age''s most extraordinary accomplishment, it was the inscribing of personal liberty into the nation''s millennial aspirations that was its most profound.

America had always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s, a pessimism accompanied a marked extremism. Even amidst historic political compromises, the middle ground collapsed.

Burton shows how the president''s authentic Southerness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans. In the violent decades to follow, while the extent of that freedom would be contested, its centrality to the definition of the country would not.

Southern writers, historians, and artists celebrate the life and career of a beloved mentor, friend, and colleague

Edited by southern historians Orville Vernon Burton and Eldred E. Prince, Jr., Becoming Southern Writers pays tribute to South Carolinian Charles Joyner''s fifty year career as a southern historian, folklorist, and social activist. Exceptional writers of fact, fiction, and poetry, the contributors to the volume are among Joyner''s many friends, admirers, and colleagues as well as those to whom Joyner has served as a mentor. The contributors describe how they came to write about the South and how they came to write about it in the way they do while reflecting on the humanistic tradition of scholarship as lived experience.

The contributors constitute a Who''s Who of southern writers—from award-winning literary artists to historians. Freed from constraints of their disciplines by Joyner''s example, they enthusiastically describe family reunions, involvement in the civil rights movement, research projects, and mentors. While not all contributors are native to the South or the United States and a few write about the South only occasionally, all the essayists root their work in southern history, and all have made distinguished contributions to southern writing. Diverse in theme and style, these writings represent each author''s personal reflections on experiences living in and writing about the South while touching on topics that surfaced in Joyner''s own works, such as race, family, culture, and place. Whether based on personal or historical events, each one speaks to Joyner''s theme that "all history is local history, somewhere."

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title • A provocative look into civil rights progress in the Palmetto State from activists, statesmen, and historians

Toward the Meeting of the Waters represents a watershed moment in civil rights history—bringing together voices of leading historians alongside recollections from central participants to provide the first comprehensive history of the civil rights movement as experienced by black and white South Carolinians. Edited by Winfred B. Moore Jr. and Orville Vernon Burton, this work originated with a highly publicized landmark conference on civil rights held at the Citadel in Charleston.

The volume opens with an assessment of the transition of South Carolina leaders from defiance to moderate enforcement of federally mandated integration and includes commentary by former governor and U.S. senator Ernest F. Hollings and former governor John C. West. Subsequent chapters recall defining moments of white-on-black violence and aggression to set the context for understanding the efforts of reformers such as Levi G. Byrd and Septima Poinsette Clark and for interpreting key episodes of white resistance. Emerging from these essays is arresting evidence that, although South Carolina did not experience as much violence as many other southern states, the civil rights movement here was more fiercely embattled than previously acknowledged.

The section of retrospectives serves as an oral history of the era as it was experienced by a mixture of locally and nationally recognized participants, including historians such as John Hope Franklin and Tony Badger as well as civil rights activists Joseph A. De Laine Jr., Beatrice Brown Rivers, Charles McDew, Constance Curry, Matthew J. Perry Jr., Harvey B. Gantt, and Cleveland Sellers Jr. The volume concludes with essays by historians Gavin Wright, Dan Carter, and Charles Joyner, who bring this story to the present day and examine the legacy of the civil rights movement in South Carolina from a modern perspective.

Toward the Meeting of the Waters also includes thirty-seven photographs from the period, most of them by Cecil Williams and many published here for the first time.