Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History – Serie

American scholarship is richer for this unique exercise. More important, the great community, . . . one again sorely beset by unsettled problems of sectional rivalry and world tension, can read this book with great profit. Too few historians put their talents at the disposal of society so effectively. - American Historical Review""A brilliant, straightforward summary of the background of America's favourite armchair war. So deceptively simple is [Craven's] exposition that the solid worth of the book sneaks up on the reader when, having finished it, he realises that the brief volume may be short on detail but is complete as a well-considered, authoritative statement of history."" - Chicago Tribune""Never has he, or anyone else, analysed the growing sectional conflict in more graphic or understandable terms than in the present volume."" - Civil War History

Frederick Law Olmsted, the northerner who wrote comprehensively about his travels in the South, had no southern counterpart. But there were thousands of southerners - planters, merchants, bankers, students, housewives, writers, and politicians - who traveled extensively in the North and who recorded their impressions in letters to their families, in articles for the local press, and in the few books they wrote.In A Southern Odyssey the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin canvasses the entire field of southern travel and analyses the travelers and their accounts of what they saw in the North. Many went out of sheer curiosity. Others went on business, to get an education, to make purchases for the store and home, to attend religious or political conventions, or to instruct northerners about the superior qualities of the southern way of life and warn them of the dangers of unbridled abolitionist attacks.The more they went, the more they doubted the wisdom of spending money among their enemies. But they continued to go, even against their own advice to fellow southerners, and some tarried until the attack on Fort Sumter.Concentrating as it does on the human side of North-South relations during the antebellum years, A Southern Odyssey represents a fresh and imaginative approach to a long overlooked chapter in southern history. It is also a handsome book, with twenty illustrations that comprise ""An Album of Southern Travel.

First published in 1949, Frank Lawrence Owsley's Plain Folk of the Old South refuted the popular myth that the antebellum South contained only three classes, planters, poor whites, and slaves. Owsley draws on a wide range of source materials, firsthand accounts such as diaries and the published observations of travelers and journalists; church records; and county records, including wills, deeds, tax lists, and grand-jury reports, to accurately reconstruct the prewar South's large and significant ""yeoman farmer"" middle class. He follows the history of this group, beginning with their migration from the Atlantic states into the frontier South, charts their property holdings and economic standing, and tells of the rich texture of their lives: the singing schools and corn shuckings, their courtship rituals and revival meetings, barn raisings and logrollings, and contests of marksmanship and horsemanship such as ""snuffing the candle,"" ""driving the nail,"" and the ""gander pull.

In a career that has spanned more than half a century, C Vann Woodward has come to be regarded as one of the foremost historians of the United States. His writings on the South - particularly on the period of the New South - have inspired the admiration and awe of more than a generation of colleagues and students. Thinking Back is Woodward's retrospective view of his experience as a historian. Neither a personal nor an intellectual autobiography, it is a book in which Woodward describes - through a consideration of his own books and the critical dialogue they have engendered - how the history of the South was viewed and written during the early years fo the century, how those views hve changed over the decades, and the turbulent forces that have influenced revisions in interpretation, subject matter, and comprehension. Thinking Back is without precedent, a book thta could have been written by no one but Woodward himself. Woodward recalls the South of the 1930s, the formative period when the young man from rural Arkansas determined the course his life would take. He describes his university years at Emory and Chapel Hill (where he finished his first book, a biography of Georgia Populist Tom Watson), his early mentors, and the early misgivings he had about a career as a historian. He remembers the honor he felt on being asked, at the tender age of thirty, to write one of the volumes in the prestigious series A History of the South. That book, Origins of the New South - more than twelve years in the making - would become one of his most important contributions to southern historiography. Woodward describes his astonishment at the unexpected success of his seventh book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which was written in the summer months of 1954, just after the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. He also relates the circumstances that, in the late 1950s, compelled him to write another of his more influential works, The Burden of Southern History. In each instance Woodward reflects on what he was trying to do in his books, what forces he was reacting against, what people events, and ideas influenced him, and how he now assesses his work. With candor and cordiality, he addresses his critics as colleagues rather than as adversaries, agreeing with some, debating with others, and venturing criticisms of his own work that they may have overlooked. He considers the perils of the historian as presentist, as ironist, as moralist, and as ideologue, and the risks of writing with conviction and passion on controversial subjects. Thinking Back is vintage Woodward. It is expertly crafted, admirably modulated, witty, and a delight to read. For readers of history interested in how the historian works, the risks he takes, the doubts that plague him, and the forces that move him, this book will have unique appeal. There is nothing else quite like it.

For decades, historians have debated the meaning and significance of Confederate nationalism and the role it played in the outcome of the Civil War. Yet they have paid little attention to the actual development and content of this Confederate ideology. In The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, Drew Gilpin Faust argues that coming to a fuller understanding of southern thought during the Civil War period offers a valuable refraction of the essential assumptions on which the Old South and the Confederacy were built. She shows the benefits of exploring Confederate nationalism ""as the South's commentary upon itself, as its effort to represent southern culture to the world at large, to history, and perhaps most revealingly, to its own people.

Robert V. Remini, the nation's foremost authority on Andrew Jackson, has over the past three decades published numerous books on Jackson and his presidency, including a much-praised three-volume biography. His mastery of sources and singular diligence in advancing a revised image of Jackson are universally respected. In The Legacy of Andrew Jackson, Remini discusses Jackson's role in three areas of particular importance: democracy, Indian removal, and slavery. Thoughtful and illuminating, these essays will be of great interest to historians of the Jackson era and to all students of American history.

In one of his most important books, the renowned historian Eugene D. Genovese examines slave revolts in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, placing them in the context of modern world history. By studying the conditions that favoured these revolts and the history of slave guerrilla warfare throughout the Western Hemisphere, he connects the ideology of the revolts to the ideology of the great revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century.Genovese finds that the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, constituted a turning point in the history of the slave revolts and, indeed, in the history of the human spirit. By claiming for his enslaved brothers and sisters the same right to human dignity that the French bourgeoisie claimed for itself during the French Revolution, Toussaint began the process by which slave uprisings changed from secessionist rebellions to revolutionary demands for liberty, equality, and justice.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln declared his hatred for the institution of slavery, likening his feelings of opposition to those of the abolitionists. Although the fact that Lincoln always disliked slavery is indisputable, the idea that he always opposed it with the zeal and fervor of the abolitionists remains questionable. Only four years prior to his bold declaration, Lincoln admittedly paid little attention to slavery, viewing it as only a minor issue. But in the six years preceding his presidency, his antislavery stance underwent dramatic change. Fueled by political ambition, Lincoln's argument against slavery and his prescription for dealing with it moved from what he initially labeled a middle-ground stance to a more radical position. Robert W. Johannsen's Lincoln, the South, and Slavery traces the political dimension of Lincoln's antislavery stance as it evolved from the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 to his election as president in 1860.Whereas previous scholars have largely ignored the political character of Lincoln's antislavery argument, Johannsen sees Lincoln as an astute and ambitious politician whose statements where shaped and directed by the time's ever-changing political exigencies and considerations. Johannsen does not demean the quality of Lincoln's sincerity or downgrade the importance of his moral convictions on the slavery issue, but he does suggest that politics played a larger role than previously acknowledged in the form these convictions took.The four chapters that compose this work connect Lincoln's position with his attitude toward the South and Southerners, from his initial appeal to Southerners at a time when he sought to revitalize the dying Whig party, through his deepening involvement in the Republican party, to his final belief that the South and Southern interests no longer needed to be considered as factors determining his national political success. Johannsen focuses on Lincoln's debut in 1854 as an antislavery speaker, on the development of his stand for the ultimate extinction of slavery, on his espression of the doctrine of the irrepressible conflict, and finally on Lincoln's and the South's perceptions of each other in 1860.As no other work has done, Lincoln, the South, and Slavery shows how Lincoln, in response to the demands of politics, became increasingly anti-slavery and anti-Southern during the 1850s. It will be a welcome contribution to the ongoing debate about the enigma of Lincoln and about his role in the coming of the Civil War.

In this concise but sweeping study, James Axtell depicts the complete range of transformations in southeastern Indian cultures as a result of contact, and often conflict, with European explorers and settlers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Stressing the dynamism and constant change in native cultures while showing no loss of Indian identity, Axtell effectively argues that the colonial Southeast cannot be fully understood without paying particular attention to its native inhabitants before their large-scale removal in the 1830s.Axtell begins by treating the irruption in native life of several Spanish entradas in the sixteenth century, most notably and destructively Hernando de Soto's, and the rapid decline of the great Mississippian societies in their wake. He then relates the rise and fall of the Franciscan missions in Florida to the aggressive advent of English settlement in Virginia and the Carolinas in the seventeenth century. Finally, he traces the largely symbiotic relations among the South Carolina English, the Louisiana French, and their native trading partners in the eighteenth-century deerskin business, and the growing dependence of the Indians on their white neighbors for necessities as well as conveniences and luxuries.Focusing on the primary context of interaction between natives and newcomers in each century - warfare, missions, and trade - and drawing upon a wide range of ethnohistorical sources, including written, oral, archaeological, linguistic, and artistic ones, Axtell gives a rich sense of the variety and complexity of Indian-white interactions and a clear interpretative matrix by which to assimilate the details.Based on the fifty-eighth series of Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures, The Indians' New South is a colourful, accessible account of the clash of cultures in the colonial Southeast. It will prove essential and entertaining reading for all students of Native America and the South.

In this groundbreaking study, Charles W. Ramsdell explores the causes of the South's defeat in the Civil War. Finding traditional military explanations insufficient, he argues that deficiencies on the homefront were fundamental to the collapse of the Confederacy.According to Ramsdell, the war raised economic and social problems that the southern people were unprepared to solve. Financially weakened and demoralized, the civilian population could not adequately support its armies, causing the Confederacy to break down from within long before the military situation appeared desperate.

Carter's essays present graphic evidence of the extent to which race continues to matter in American politics. - Journal of Southern HistoryIn this penetrating survey of the last three decades, Dan T. Carter examines race as an issue in presidential politics. Drawing on his broad knowledge of recent political history, he traces the ""counterrevolutionary"" response to the civil rights movement since Wallace's emergence on the national scene in 1963, and detects a gradual intersection of racial and economic conservatism in the coalition that re-shaped American politics from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. Concise yet replete with insight, wit, and often-amusing, always-telling anecdotes, this timely, timeless book is an uncommon blend of important and enjoyable reading.

Dominated by the personalities of three towering figures of the nation's middle period - Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and President Andrew Jackson - Olive Branch and Sword: The Compromise of 1833 tells of the political and rhetorical dueling that brought about the Compromise of 1833, resolving the crisis of the Union caused by South Carolina's nullification of the protective tariff. In 1832 South Carolina's John C. Calhoun denounced the entire protectionist system as unconstitutional, unequal, and founded on selfish sectional interests. Opposing him was Henry Clay, the Kentucky senator and champion of the protectionists. Both Calhoun and Clay had presidential ambitions, and neither could agree on any issue save their common opposition to President Jackson, who seemed to favour a military solution to the South Carolina problem. It was only when Clay, after the most complicated maneuverings, produced the Compromise of 1833 that he, Calhoun, and Jackson could agree to coexist peaceably within the Union.The compromise consisted of two key parts. The Compromise Tariff, written by Clay and approved by Calhoun, provided for the gradual reduction of duties to the revenue level of 20 percent. The Force Bill, enacted at the request of President Jackson, authorized the use of military force, if necessary, to put down nullification in South Carolina. The two acts became, respectively, the olive branch and the sword of the compromise that preserved the peace, the Union, and the Constitution in 1833.A careful study of what has become a neglected event in American political history, Merrill D. Peterson's work spans a period of over thirty years - sketching the background of national policy out of which nullification arose, detailing the explosive events of 1832 and 1833, and then tracing the consequences of the compromise through the dozen or so years that it remained in public controversy. Considering as well the larger question of decision making and policy making in the Jacksonian republic, Peterson nonetheless never loses sight of the crucial role played by the ambitions, whims, and passions of such men as Calhoun, Clay, and Jackson in determining the course of history.

One reason that the South attracts so much interest is that its history inevitably involves big questions, continuity versus change, slavery and freedom, the meaning of ""race,"" the formation of national identity, the struggle between local and centralized authority. Because these issues are central to human experience, southern history properly conceived is of more than regional interest. In A Sphinx on the American Land, Peter Kolchin explores three comparative frameworks for the study of the nineteenth-century South in an effort to nudge the subject away from provincialism and toward the kind of global concerns that are already transforming it into one of the most innovative fields of historical research.The volume opens with a comparison between the South and the North, or what Kolchin terms the ""un-South."" This basic context, he explains, provides an essential backdrop for understanding the South; how one conceptualizes ""southernness"" has meaning only in terms of what it is not. Turning to the cohesion and variations among what he calls the ""many Souths,"" Kolchin reminds us that there has never been one South or archetypal southerner. Internal distinctions, whether geographic, class, religious, or racial, ultimately raise the question of whether one can properly speak of ""the"" South at all.Finally, Kolchin explores parallels between the South and regions outside the United States, or ""other Souths."" He considers a number of ways in which the South can be studied in a broad international setting, paying particular attention to the similarities and differences between the emancipation of southern slaves and Russian serfs. In an eloquent afterword, he ponders the nature and importance of comparative history.Kolchin examines how scholars have approached each of his comparative frameworks and how they might do so in the future, making A Sphinx on the American Land at once a work of history and of historiography. Illustrating the ways in which southern history is also American history and world history, this elegant, profound volume proves Kolchin to be one of the stellar southern historians of his generation.

Nothing But Freedom examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under. Taking a comparative approach, Eric Foner examines Reconstruction in the southern states against the experience of Haiti, where a violent slave revolt was followed by the establishment of an undemocratic government and the imposition of a system of forced labor; the British Caribbean, where the colonial government oversaw an orderly transition from slavery to the creation of an almost totally dependent work force; and early twentieth-century southern and eastern Africa, where a self-sufficient peasantry was dispossessed in order to create a dependent black work force. Measuring the progress of freedmen in the post-Civil War South against that of freedmen in other recently emancipated societies, Foner reveals Reconstruction to have been, despite its failings, a unique and dramatic experiment in interracial democracy in the aftermath of slavery. Steven Hahn's timely new foreword places Foner's analysis in the context of recent scholarship and assesses its enduring impact in the twenty-first century.

First published in 1949, Frank Lawrence Owsley's Plain Folk of the Old South refuted the popular myth that the antebellum South contained only three classes, planters, poor whites, and slaves. Owsley draws on a wide range of source materials, firsthand accounts such as diaries and the published observations of travelers and journalists; church records; and county records, including wills, deeds, tax lists, and grand-jury reports, to accurately reconstruct the prewar South's large and significant ""yeoman farmer"" middle class. He follows the history of this group, beginning with their migration from the Atlantic states into the frontier South, charts their property holdings and economic standing, and tells of the rich texture of their lives: the singing schools and corn shuckings, their courtship rituals and revival meetings, barn raisings and logrollings, and contests of marksmanship and horsemanship such as ""snuffing the candle,"" ""driving the nail,"" and the ""gander pull."" A new introduction by John B. Boles explains why this book remains the starting point today for the study of society in the Old South.

Through an analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents an innovative look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. He draws a distinction between slavery as a form of work organisation, the aspect that has dominated historical debates, and slavery as a set of property rights. Slave-based commerce remained central to the eighteenth-century rise of the Atlantic economy, not because slave plantations were superior as a method of organizing production, but because slaves could be put to work on sugar plantations that could not have attracted free labor on economically viable terms.

In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colourful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane University, resided among the ""artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter."" In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner's circle of friends - ranging from the distinguished Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer - and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the Jazz Age.Reed begins with Faulkner and Spratling's self-published homage to their fellow bohemians, ""Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles."" The book contained 43 sketches of New Orleans artists, by Spratling, with captions and a short introduction by Faulkner. The title served as a rather obscure joke: Sherwood was not a Creole and neither were most of the people featured. But with Reed's commentary, these profiles serve as an entry into the world of artists and writers that dined on Decatur Street, attended masked balls, and blatantly ignored the Prohibition Act. These men and women also helped to establish New Orleans institutions such as the Double Dealer literary magazine, the Arts and Crafts Club, and Le Petit Theatre. But unlike most bohemias, the one in New Orleans existed as a whites-only affair. Though some of the bohemians were relatively progressive, and many employed African American material in their own work, few of them knew or cared about what was going on across town among the city's black intellectuals and artists.The positive developments from this French Quarter renaissance, however, attracted attention and visitors, inspiring the historic preservation and commercial revitalization that turned the area into a tourist destination. Predictably, this gentrification drove out many of the working artists and writers who had helped revive the area. As Reed points out, one resident who identified herself as an ""artist"" on the 1920 federal census gave her occupation in 1930 as ""saleslady, real estate,"" reflecting the decline of an active artistic class.A charming and insightful glimpse into an era, Dixie Bohemia describes the writers, artists, poseurs, and hangers-on in the New Orleans art scene of the 1920s and illuminates how this dazzling world faded as quickly as it began.

In Jefferson and the Virginians, renowned scholar Peter S. Onuf examines the ways in which Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Virginians, George Washington, James Madison, and Patrick Henry, both conceptualized their home state from a political and cultural perspective, and understood its position in the new American union. The conversations Onuf reconstructs offer glimpses into the struggle to define Virginia, and America, within the context of the upheaval of the Revolutionary War. Onuf also demonstrates why Jefferson's identity as a Virginian obscures more than it illuminates about his ideology and career.Onuf contends that Jefferson and his interlocutors sought to define Virginia's character as a self-constituted commonwealth and to determine the state's place in the American union during an era of constitutional change and political polarization. Thus, the outcome of the American Revolution led to ongoing controversies over the identity of Virginians and Americans as a ""people"" or ""peoples""; over Virginia's boundaries and jurisdiction within the union; and over the system of government in Virginia and for the states collectively. Each debate required a balanced consideration of corporate identity and collective interests, which inevitably raised broader questions about the character of the Articles of Confederation and the newly formed federal union. Onuf's well-researched study reveals how this indeterminacy demanded definition and, likewise, how the need for definition prompted further controversy.

Taking a wide focus, Southern Journey narrates the evolution of southern history from the founding of the nation to the present day by focusing on the settling, unsettling, and resettling of the South. Using migration as the dominant theme of southern history and including indigenous, white, black, and immigrant people in the story, Edward L. Ayers cuts across the usual geographic, thematic, and chronological boundaries that subdivide southern history. Ayers explains the major contours and events of the southern past from a fresh perspective, weaving geography with history in innovative ways. He uses unique color maps created with sophisticated geographic information system (GIS) tools to interpret massive data sets from a humanistic perspective, providing a view of movement within the South with a clarity, detail, and continuity we have not seen before. The South has never stood still; it is - and always has been - changing in deep, radical, sometimes contradictory ways, often in divergent directions. Ayers's history of migration in the South is a broad yet deep reinterpretation of the region's past that informs our understanding of the population, economy, politics, and culture of the South today. Southern Journey is not only a pioneering work of history; it is a grand recasting of the South's past by one of its most renowned and appreciated scholars.

In Stepdaughters of History, noted scholar Catherine Clinton reflects on the roles of women as historical actors within the field of Civil War studies and examines the ways in which historians have redefined female wartime participation. Clinton contends that despite the recent attention, white and black women's contributions remain shrouded in myth and sidelined in traditional historical narratives. Her work tackles some of these well-worn assumptions, dismantling prevailing attitudes that consign women to the footnotes of Civil War texts.Clinton highlights some of the debates, led by emerging and established Civil War scholars, which seek to demolish demeaning and limiting stereotypes of southern women as simpering belles, stoic Mammies, Rebel spitfires, or sultry spies. Such caricatures mask the more concrete and compelling struggles within the Confederacy, and in Clinton's telling, a far more balanced and vivid understanding of women's roles within the wartime South emerges. New historical evidence has given rise to fresh insights, including important revisionist literature on women's overt and covert participation in activities designed to challenge the rebellion and on white women's roles in reshaping the war's legacy in postwar narratives. Increasingly, Civil War scholarship integrates those women who defied gender conventions to assume men's roles—including those few who gained notoriety as spies, scouts, or soldiers during the war.As Clinton's work demonstrates, the larger questions of women's wartime contributions remain important correctives to our understanding of the war's impact. Through a fuller appreciation of the dynamics of sex and race, Stepdaughters of History promises a broader conversation in the twenty-first century, inviting readers to continue to confront the conundrums of the American Civil War.