Myth and Southern History: The Old South

Myth and Southern History: The Old South PDF Author: Patrick Gerster
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Southern States
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Myth and Southern History: The Old South

Myth and Southern History: The Old South PDF Author: Patrick Gerster
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Southern States
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Myth and Southern History: The Old South

Myth and Southern History: The Old South PDF Author: Patrick Gerster
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252060243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Many historical myths are actually false yet psychologically true. The contributors to this volume see myth and reality as complementary elements in the historical record. Myth and Southern History is as much a commentary on southern historiography as it is on the viability of myth in the historical process. Volume 2: The New South offers new perspectives on the North's role in southern mythology, the so-called Savage South, twentieth-century black and white southern women, and the "changes" that distinguish the late twentieth-century South from that of the Civil War era.

The New South Creed

The New South Creed PDF Author: Paul M. Gaston
Publisher: NewSouth Books
ISBN: 1603061444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
First published in 1970, The New South Creed has lost none of its usefulness to anyone examining the dream of a "New South" -- prosperous, powerful, racially harmonious -- that developed in the three decades after the Civil War, and the transformation of that dream into widely accepted myths, shielding and perpetuating a conservative, racist society. Many young moderates of the period created a philosophy designed to enrich the region -- attempting to both restore the power and prestige and to lay the race question to rest. In spite of these men and their efforts, their dream of a New South joined the Antebellum illusion as a genuine social myth, with a controlling power over the way in which their followers, in both North and South, perceived reality.

Creating an Old South

Creating an Old South PDF Author: Edward E. Baptist
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860034
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Set on the antebellum southern frontier, this book uses the history of two counties in Florida's panhandle to tell the story of the migrations, disruptions, and settlements that made the plantation South. Soon after the United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1821, migrants from older southern states began settling the land that became Jackson and Leon Counties. Slaves, torn from family and community, were forced to carve plantations from the woods of Middle Florida, while planters and less wealthy white men battled over the social, political, and economic institutions of their new society. Conflict between white men became full-scale crisis in the 1840s, but when sectional conflict seemed to threaten slavery, the whites of Middle Florida found common ground. In politics and everyday encounters, they enshrined the ideal of white male equality--and black inequality. To mask their painful memories of crisis, the planter elite told themselves that their society had been transplanted from older states without conflict. But this myth of an "Old," changeless South only papered over the struggles that transformed slave society in the course of its expansion. In fact, that myth continues to shroud from our view the plantation frontier, the very engine of conflict that had led to the myth's creation.

Myth and Southern History: The New South

Myth and Southern History: The New South PDF Author: Patrick Gerster
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Southern States
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The Old South

The Old South PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780252060243
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Normans and Saxons

Normans and Saxons PDF Author: Ritchie Devon Watson
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807134333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
When Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned Senator Charles Sumner Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 21, 1856, southerners viewed the attack as a triumphant affirmation of southern chivalry, northerners as a confirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was similarly divided nearly three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John Brown's raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, with northerners crowning John Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom as southerners excoriated him as a consciousness fanatic. These events opened American minds to the possibility that North and South might be incompatible societies, but some of Dixie's defenders were willing to go one step further -- to propose that northerners and southerners represented not just a "divided people" but two scientifically distinct races. In Normans and Saxons, Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the complex racial mythology created by the upper classes of the antebellum South in the wake of these divisive events to justify secession and, eventually, the Civil War. This mythology cast southerners as descendants of the Normans of eleventh-century England and thus also of the Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, some of whom had come to the New World and populated the southern colonies. These Normans were opposed, in mythic terms, by Saxons -- Englishmen of German descent -- some of whose descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later fanned out to populate the rest of the North. The myth drew on nineteenth-century science and other sources to portray these as two separate, warring "races," the aristocratic and dashing Normans versus the common and venal Saxons. According to Watson, southern polemical writers employed this racial mythology as a justification of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South's peculiar institution had combined with its Norman racial composition to produce an arrogant and brutal land of oligarchs with a second-rate culture. Watson finds evidence for this argument in both prose and poetry, from the literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, De Bow's Review, and other antebellum southern magazines, to fiction by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Alexander Caruthers and northern and southern poetry during the Civil War, especially in the works of Walt Whitman. Watson also traces the continuing impact of the Norman versus Saxon myth in "Lost Cause" thought and how the myth has affected ideas about southern sectionalism of today. Normans and Saxons provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which myth ultimately helped to convince Americans that regional differences over the issue of slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences in racial temperament -- differences that made civil war inevitable.

Plain Folk of the Old South

Plain Folk of the Old South PDF Author: Frank Lawrence Owsley
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807133422
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
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.

Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind

Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind PDF Author: Stephen A. Smith
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 9781610752725
Category : Mass media
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Souvenirs of the Old South

Souvenirs of the Old South PDF Author: Rebecca C. McIntyre
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 081305978X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
"Written in a clear, accessible, and lively style, Souvenirs of the Old South will be the foundational work for subsequent scholars and readers interested in tourism in the New South."--W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory "This study of southern images offers readers a glimpse of how history, culture, race, and class came together in the tourist imagination. If the South emerged from the Civil War a distinctive place, Rebecca McIntyre would remind us that’s because distinctiveness sells."--Richard Starnes, author of Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina Less than a decade after the conclusion of the Civil War, northern promoters began pushing images of a mythic South to boost tourism. By creating a hierarchical relationship based on region and race in which northerners were always superior, promoters saw tourist dollars begin flowing southward, but this cultural construction was damaging to southerners, particularly African Americans. Rebecca McIntyre focuses on the years between 1870 and 1920, a period framed by the war and the growth of automobile tourism. These years were critical in the creation of the South’s modern identity, and she reveals that tourism images created by northerners for northerners had as much effect on making the South "southern" as did the most ardent proponents of the Lost Cause. She also demonstrates how northern tourism contributed to the worsening of race relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.