Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South PDF Author: Ken Fones-Wolf
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252097009
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South

Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South PDF Author: Ken Fones-Wolf
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252097009
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

Framing the South

Framing the South PDF Author: Allison Graham
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801875714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
What patterns emerge in media coverage and character depiction of Southern men and women, blacks and whites, in the years between 1954 and 1976? How do portrayals of the region and the equal rights movement illuminate the spirit and experience of the South—and of the nation as a whole? In Framing the South, Allison Graham examines the ways in which the media, particularly television and film, presented Southerners during the period of the civil rights revolution. Graham analyzes depictions of southern race and social class in a wide range of Hollywood films—including A Streetcar Named Desire, The Three Faces of Eve, and A Face in the Crowd from the 1950s; later films like Cool Hand Luke, In the Heat of the Night, and Mississippi Burning; and MGM's Elvis Presley vehicles. She traces how films have confronted—or avoided—issues of racism over the years, paralleling Hollywood depictions with the tamer characterization of the likeable "hillbilly" popularized in television's The Real McCoys and The Andy Griffith Show. Graham reinforces the political impact of these fictional representations by examining media coverage of civil rights demonstrations, including the documentary Crisis: Behind the Presidential Commitment, which reported the clash between Robert Kennedy and Governor George Wallace over the integration of the University of Alabama. She concludes with a provocative analysis of Forrest Gump, identifying the popular film as a retelling of post-World War II Southern history.

Selling Free Enterprise

Selling Free Enterprise PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252064395
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The post-World War II years in the United States were marked by the business community's efforts to discredit New Deal liberalism and undermine the power and legitimacy of organized labor. In Selling Free Enterprise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf describes how conservative business leaders strove to reorient workers away from their loyalties to organized labor and government, teaching that prosperity could be achieved through reliance on individual initiative, increased productivity, and the protection of personal liberty. Based on research in a wide variety of business and labor sources, this detailed account shows how business permeated every aspect of American life, including factories, schools, churches, and community institutions.

Waves of Opposition

Waves of Opposition PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252073649
Category : Labor unions
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
'Waves of Opposition' describes and analyses the battles over the powerful medium of radio, which helped spark the massive upsurge of organised labour during the Depression. The text demonstrates its importance as a weapon in an ideological war between labour and business.

Struggle for a Better South

Struggle for a Better South PDF Author: G. Michel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403981817
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Struggle for a Better South dispels the notion that all whites in the South stood united against social change in the 1960s. Gregg Michel's compelling study of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), the leading progressive organization created by young white activists in the South during that tumultuous decade, fills a crucial gap in the literature about New Left activism. Michel shows that the SSOC was the only activist group of the era that worked to cultivate white support for the social movement. The SSOC's members gave themselves the delicate task of reconciling their love for the South and its history - warts and all - with their modern-day commitment to equality and justice for all people.

How the South Won the Civil War

How the South Won the Civil War PDF Author: Heather Cox Richardson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190900911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.

Cities of the Dead

Cities of the Dead PDF Author: William A. Blair
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Exploring the history of Civil War commemorations from both sides of the color line, William Blair places the development of memorial holidays, Emancipation Day celebrations, and other remembrances in the context of Reconstruction politics and race relations in the South. His grassroots examination of these civic rituals demonstrates that the politics of commemoration remained far more contentious than has been previously acknowledged. Commemorations by ex-Confederates were intended at first to maintain a separate identity from the U.S. government, Blair argues, not as a vehicle for promoting sectional healing. The burial grounds of fallen heroes, known as Cities of the Dead, often became contested ground, especially for Confederate women who were opposed to Reconstruction. And until the turn of the century, African Americans used freedom celebrations to lobby for greater political power and tried to create a national holiday to recognize emancipation. Blair's analysis shows that some festive occasions that we celebrate even today have a divisive and sometimes violent past as various groups with conflicting political agendas attempted to define the meaning of the Civil War.

The Struggle for America's Soul

The Struggle for America's Soul PDF Author: Robert Wuthnow
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802804693
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Discusses the schism between the religious right and mainstream Protestantism, the separation of church and state, and the relationship between science and religion.

This Republic of Suffering

This Republic of Suffering PDF Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375703837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America

Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America PDF Author: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039335573X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 689

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Book Description
Winner of the 2020 PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the 2020 Summersell Prize, a 2020 PROSE Award, and a Plutarch Award finalist “The word befitting this work is ‘masterpiece.’ ” —Paula J. Giddings, author of Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin were raised in a culture of white supremacy. While Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters sought their fortunes in the North, reinventing themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation’s attention to issues of region, race, and labor. National Humanities Award–winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past. Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood. Grounded in decades of research, the family’s private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace, Sisters and Rebels unfolds an epic narrative of American history through the lives of three Southern women.