Author: Michael S. Frawley
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807171395
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
In the aftermath of the Civil War, contemporary narratives about the American South pointed to the perceived lack of industrial development in the region to explain why the Confederacy succumbed to the Union. Even after the cliometric revolution of the 1970s, when historians first began applying statistical analysis to reexamine antebellum manufacturing output, the pervasive belief in the region’s backward-ness prompted many scholars to view slavery, not industry, as the economic engine of the South. In Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South, historian Michael S. Frawley engages a wide variety of sources—including United States census data, which many historians have underutilized when gauging economic growth in the prewar South—to show how industrial development in the region has been systematically minimized by scholars. In doing so, Frawley reconsiders factors related to industrial production in the prewar South, such as the availability of natural resources, transportation, markets, labor, and capital. He contends that the Gulf South was far more industrialized and modern than suggested by census records, economic historians like Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, and contemporary travel writers such as Frederick Law Olmsted. Frawley situates the prewar South firmly in a varied and widespread industrial context, contesting the assumption that slavery inhibited industry in the region and that this lack of economic diversity ultimately prevented the Confederacy from waging a successful war. Though southern manufacturing firms could not match the output of northern states, Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South proves that such entities had established themselves as vital forces in the southern economy on the eve of the Civil War.
Author: Carl A. Zimring
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421421860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Tracing the benefits—and limitations—of repurposing aluminum. Besides being the right thing to do for Mother Earth, recycling can also make money—particularly when it comes to upcycling, a zero waste practice where discarded materials are fashioned into goods of greater economic or cultural value. In Upcycling Aluminum, Carl A. Zimring explores how the metal’s abundance after World War II—coupled with the significant economic and environmental costs of smelting it from bauxite ore—led to the industrial production of valuable durable goods from salvaged aluminum. Beginning in 1886 with the discovery of how to mass produce aluminum, the book examines the essential part the metal played in early aviation and the world wars, as well as the troubling expansion of aluminum as a material of mass disposal. Recognizing that scrap aluminum was as good as virgin material and much more affordable than newly engineered metal, designers in the postwar era used aluminum to manufacture highly prized artifacts. Zimring takes us on a tour of post-1940s design, examining the use of aluminum in cars, trucks, airplanes, furniture, and musical instruments from 1945 to 2015. By viewing upcycling through the lens of one material, Zimring deepens our understanding of the history of recycling in industrial society. He also provides a historical perspective on contemporary sustainable design practices. Along the way, he challenges common assumptions about upcycling’s merits and adds a new dimension to recycling as a form of environmental absolution for the waste-related sins of the modern world. Raising fascinating questions of consumption, environment, and desire, Upcycling Aluminum is for anyone interested in industrial and environmental history, discard studies, engineering, product design, music history, or antiques.
Author: Stephen W. Campbell
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700634185
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
President Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States was one of the most consequential political struggles in the early nineteenth century. A fight over the bank’s reauthorization, the Bank War provoked fundamental disagreements over the role of money in politics, competing constitutional interpretations, equal opportunity in the face of a state-sanctioned monopoly, and the importance of financial regulation—all of which cemented emerging differences between Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs. As Stephen W. Campbell argues here, both sides in the Bank War engaged interregional communications networks funded by public and private money. The first reappraisal of this political turning point in US history in almost fifty years, The Bank War and the Partisan Press advances a new interpretation by focusing on the funding and dissemination of the party press. Drawing on insights from the fields of political history, the history of journalism, and financial history, The Bank War and the Partisan Press brings to light a revolving cast of newspaper editors, financiers, and postal workers who appropriated the financial resources of preexisting political institutions and even created new ones to enrich themselves and further their careers. The bank propagated favorable media and tracked public opinion through its system of branch offices, while the Jacksonians did the same by harnessing the patronage networks of the Post Office. Campbell’s work contextualizes the Bank War within larger political and economic developments at the national and international levels. Its focus on the newspaper business documents the transition from a seemingly simple question of renewing the bank’s charter to a multisided, nationwide sensation that sorted the US public into ideologically polarized political parties. In doing so, The Bank War and the Partisan Press shows how the conflict played out on the ground level in various states—in riots, duels, raucous public meetings, politically orchestrated bank runs, arson, and assassination attempts. The resulting narrative moves beyond the traditional boxing match between Jackson and bank president Nicholas Biddle, balancing political institutions with individual actors, and business practices with party attitudes.
Author: Allen C. Guelzo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190865695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
Allen C. Guelzo's Reconstruction: A Concise History is a gracefully written interpretation of Reconstruction as a spirited struggle to reintegrate the defeated Southern Confederacy into the American Union after the Civil War, to bring African Americans into the political mainstream of American life, and to recreate the Southern economy after a Northern free-labor model.
Author: Steven J. Ramold
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574418025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 505
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Book Description
Despite popular belief, the Civil War did not end when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, in April 1865. The Confederacy still had tens of thousands of soldiers under arms, in three main field armies and countless smaller commands scattered throughout the South. Although pressed by Union forces at varying degrees, all of the remaining Confederate armies were capable of continuing the war if they chose to do so. But they did not, even when their political leaders ordered them to continue the fight. Convinced that most civilians no longer wanted to continue the war, the senior Confederate military leadership, over the course of several weeks, surrendered their armies under different circumstances. Gen. Joseph Johnston surrendered his army in North Carolina only after contentious negotiations with Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Gen. Richard Taylor ended the fighting in Alabama in the face of two massive Union incursions into the state rather than try to consolidate with other Confederate armies. Personal rivalry also played a part in his practical considerations to surrender. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith had the decision to surrender taken out of his hands—disastrous economic conditions in his Trans-Mississippi Department had eroded morale to such an extent that his soldiers demobilized themselves, leaving Kirby Smith a general without an army. The end of the Confederacy was a messy and complicated affair, a far cry from the tidy closure associated with the events at Appomattox.
Author: Broadus Mitchell
Publisher: Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins Press
ISBN:
Category : Cotton growing
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Author: Amy S. Greenberg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804173443
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
The little-known story of remarkable First Lady Sarah Polk—a brilliant master of the art of high politics and a crucial but unrecognized figure in the history of American feminism. While the Women’s Rights convention was taking place at Seneca Falls in 1848, First Lady Sarah Childress Polk was wielding influence unprecedented for a woman in Washington, D.C. Yet, while history remembers the women of the convention, it has all but forgotten Sarah Polk. Now, in her riveting biography, Amy S. Greenberg brings Sarah’s story into vivid focus. We see Sarah as the daughter of a frontiersman who raised her to discuss politics and business with men; we see the savvy and charm she brandished in order to help her brilliant but unlikeable husband, James K. Polk, ascend to the White House. We watch as she exercises truly extraordinary power as First Lady: quietly manipulating elected officials, shaping foreign policy, and directing a campaign in support of America’s expansionist war against Mexico. And we meet many of the enslaved men and women whose difficult labor made Sarah’s political success possible. Sarah Polk’s life spanned nearly the entirety of the nineteenth-century. But her own legacy, which profoundly transformed the South, continues to endure. Comprehensive, nuanced, and brimming with invaluable insight, Lady First is a revelation of our twelfth First Lady’s complex but essential part in American feminism.
Author: Matthew Hild
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813065771
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
United Association for Labor Education Best Book Award The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of the working classes. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing workers today have deep roots in the history of the exploitation of labor in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the country. Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine vagrancy laws in the early republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, and strikes and the often-violent strikebreaking that followed. They also look at pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers. The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South by a new generation of scholars, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today. Contributors: David M. Anderson | Deborah Beckel | Thomas Brown | Dana M. Caldemeyer | Adam Carson | Theresa Case | Erin L. Conlin | Brett J. Derbes | Maria Angela Diaz | Alan Draper | Matthew Hild | Joseph E. Hower | T.R.C. Hutton | Stuart MacKay | Andrew C. McKevitt | Keri Leigh Merritt | Bethany Moreton | Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan | Michael Sistrom | Joseph M. Thompson | Linda Tvrdy
Author: Michael S. Frawley
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807171409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
In the aftermath of the Civil War, contemporary narratives about the American South pointed to the perceived lack of industrial development in the region to explain why the Confederacy succumbed to the Union. Even after the cliometric revolution of the 1970s, when historians first began applying statistical analysis to reexamine antebellum manufacturing output, the pervasive belief in the region’s backward-ness prompted many scholars to view slavery, not industry, as the economic engine of the South. In Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South, historian Michael S. Frawley engages a wide variety of sources—including United States census data, which many historians have underutilized when gauging economic growth in the prewar South—to show how industrial development in the region has been systematically minimized by scholars. In doing so, Frawley reconsiders factors related to industrial production in the prewar South, such as the availability of natural resources, transportation, markets, labor, and capital. He contends that the Gulf South was far more industrialized and modern than suggested by census records, economic historians like Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, and contemporary travel writers such as Frederick Law Olmsted. Frawley situates the prewar South firmly in a varied and widespread industrial context, contesting the assumption that slavery inhibited industry in the region and that this lack of economic diversity ultimately prevented the Confederacy from waging a successful war. Though southern manufacturing firms could not match the output of northern states, Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South proves that such entities had established themselves as vital forces in the southern economy on the eve of the Civil War.
Author: William Kauffman Scarborough
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807131555
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 541
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Book Description
William Kauffman Scarborough has produced a work of incomparable scope and depth, offering the challenge to see afresh one of the most powerful groups in American history—the wealthiest southern planters who owned 250 or more slaves in the census years of 1850 and 1860. The identification and tabulation in every slaveholding state of these lords of economic, social, and political influence reveals a highly learned class of men who set the tone for southern society while also involving themselves in the wider world of capitalism. Scarborough examines the demographics of elite families, the educational philosophy and religiosity of the nabobs, gender relations in the Big House, slave management methods, responses to secession, and adjustment to the travails of Reconstruction and an alien postwar world.
