New Perspectives on the History of the South – serie

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 a tropical slave empire. 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 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.

Focusing on the NAACP's campaign for voting rights, Manfred Berg challenges the legalistic and bureaucratic image of the NAACP and reveals a resourceful, dynamic, and politically astute organization that did much to open up the electoral process to greater black participation.

Historical treatments of race during the early twentieth century have generally focused on black women's activism. Leading books about the disenfranchisement era hint that black men withdrew from positions of community leadership until later in the century.Angela Hornsby-Gutting argues that middle-class black men in North Carolina in fact actively responded to new manifestations of racism. Focusing on the localized, grassroots work of black men during this period, she offers new insights about rarely scrutinized interracial dynamics as well as the interactions between men and women in the black community. Informed by feminist analysis, Hornsby-Gutting uses gender as the lens through which to view cooperation, tension, and negotiation between the sexes and among African American men during an era of heightened race oppression. Her work promotes improved understanding of the construct of gender during these years, and expands the vocabulary of black manhood beyond the "great man ideology" which has obfuscated alternate, localized meanings of politics, manhood, and leadership.

Counterfeit Gentlemen is a stunning reappraisal of Southern manhood and identity that uses humor and humorists to carry the reader into the very heart of antebellum culture.What does it mean to be a man in the pre-Civil War South? And how can we answer the question from the perspective of the early twenty-first century? John Mayfield does so by revealing how early nineteenth-century Southern humorists addressed the anxieties felt by men seeking to chart a new path between the old honor culture and the new market culture. Lacking the constraints imposed by journalism or proper literature, these writers created fictional worlds where manhood and identity could be tested and explored.Preoccupied alternately by moonlight and magnolias and racism and rape, we have continually presented ourselves with an Old South so mirthless it couldn't breathe. If all Mayfield did was remind us that Old Southerners laughed, he would have accomplished something. But he also offers a sophisticated analysis of the social functions humor performed and the social anxieties it reflected.

A finely layered and important study that fills in gaps in the industrial history of the New South and especially low-country South Carolina.--Sidney Bland, author of Preserving Charleston's Past, Shaping Its Future: The Life and Times of Susan Pringle Frost Skillfully blurs the old, comfortable line between Old and New South economies and paints a nuanced picture of the new labor relations in the post-slavery era.--Charles Holden, author of In the Great Maelstrom In the first book ever written about the impact of phosphate mining on the South Carolina plantation economy, Shepherd McKinley explains how the convergence of the phosphate and fertilizer industries carried long-term impacts for America and the South.Fueling the rapid growth of lowcountry fertilizer companies, phosphate mining provided elite plantation owners a way to stem losses from emancipation. At the same time, mining created an autonomous alternative to sharecropping, enabling freed people to extract housing and labor concessions.Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold develops an overarching view of what can be considered one of many key factors in the birth of southern industry. This top-down, bottom-up history (business, labor, social, and economic) analyzes an alternative path for all peoples in the post-emancipation South.

The Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs were two organizations created as part of the early civil rights efforts to address race and labor issues during the Great Depression. They fought within a leftist, Pan-African framework against disenfranchisement, segregation, labor exploitation, and colonialism.By situating the development of the SNYC and the Council on African Affairs within the scope of the long civil rights movement, Lindsey Swindall reveals how these groups conceptualized the U.S. South as being central to their vision of a global African diaspora. Both organizations illustrate well the progressive collaborations that maintained an international awareness during World War II. Cleavages from anti-radical repression in the postwar years are also evident in the dismantling of these groups when they became casualties of the early Cold War.By highlighting the cooperation that occurred between progressive activists from the Popular Front to the 1960s, Swindall adds to our understanding of the intergenerational nature of civil rights and anticolonial organizing.A volume in the series New Perspectives on the History of the South, edited by John David Smith.

Hoffschwelle tells the story of a remarkable partnership to build model schools for black children during the Jim Crow era in the South. The Rosenwald programme, which erected more than 5,300 schools and auxiliary buildings between 1912 and 1932, began with Booker T. Washington, then principal of Tuskegee Institute, who turned for financing to Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Company. By requiring communities to raise matching funds, the two men inspired a grassroots movement that built schools in 15 southern states.The Rosenwald schools, scores of which still stand, exemplified the ideal educational environment designed for efficiency, making full use of natural light to protect children’s eyesight, and providing sufficient space for learning. Ironically, these schools, which represented the social centres of their African American communities, also helped to set standards for white schools.Though the programme's funding ended with Rosenwald's death in 1932, many continued as public institutions. The National Trust for Historic Preservation named Rosenwald Schools to its list of America’s Most Endangered Historic Places in 2002. Hoffschwelle examines these buildings as exemplars for school architecture and design, as community institutions and partnerships, and as a means of formalising a state education programme that, finally, would include black children. This story of extraordinary generosity and sacrifice will interest scholars of American and African-American history, educators, school planners, and preservationists.

In this book, Zoe Colley follows civil rights activists inside the southern jails and prisons to explore their treatment and the different responses that civil rights organizations had to mass arrest and imprisonment. While some found imprisonment to be an energizing or inspiring experience and celebrated jail-going as liberating and honorable, others struggled to find a positive value.By drawing together the narratives of many individuals and organizations, Colley places imprisonment at the forefront of civil rights history and shows how these attitudes toward arrest continue to impact contemporary society and shape strategies for civil disobedience.

In the popular imagination, freedom for African Americans is often assumed to have been granted and fully realized when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation or, at the very least, at the conclusion of the Civil War. In reality, the anxiety felt by newly freed slaves and their allies in the wake of the conflict illustrates a more complicated dynamic: the meaning of freedom was vigorously, often lethally, contested in the aftermath of the war.After Slavery moves beyond broad generalizations concerning black life during Reconstruction in order to address the varied experiences of freed slaves across the South. Urban unrest in New Orleans and Wilmington, North Carolina, loyalty among former slave owners and slaves in Mississippi, armed insurrection along the Georgia coast, and racial violence throughout the region are just some of the topics examined. The essays included here are selected from the best work created for the After Slavery Project, a transatlantic research collaboration. Combined, they offer a diversity of viewpoints on the key issues in Reconstruction historiography and a well-rounded portrait of the era.

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.

In the first book ever written about the impact of phosphate mining on the South Carolina plantation economy, Shepherd McKinley explains how the convergence of the phosphate and fertilizer industries carried long-term impacts for America and the South.Fueling the rapid growth of lowcountry fertilizer companies, phosphate mining provided elite plantation owners a way to stem losses from emancipation. At the same time, mining created an autonomous alternative to sharecropping, enabling freed people to extract housing and labor concessions.Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold develops an overarching view of what can be considered one of many key factors in the birth of southern industry. This top-down, bottom-up history (business, labor, social, and economic) analyzes an alternative path for all peoples in the post-emancipation South.

Examining the African American stuggle for economic parity in the South after the 1960sRich with the voices of Black and white southern workers, From Rights to Economics shows how African Americans have continued fighting for economic parity in the decades since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.Using oral histories and case studies that focus on Black activism throughout the entire South, award-winning historian Timothy Minchin examines the work of grassroots groups—including the Southern Regional Council and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund—who struggled with the economic dimensions of the movement.While white workers and managers resisted integration, activists' efforts gradually secured a wider range of job opportunities for Black people. Minchin shows, however, that the decline of manufacturing industry in the South has been especially difficult for the African American community, wiping out many good jobs just as Black people were gaining access to them.Minchin also offers a detailed discussion of a major school integration battle in Louisville, Kentucky, and examines the role of affirmative action in the ongoing Black struggle.A volume in the series New Perspectives on the History of the South, edited by John David Smith.