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Author: David Silkenat
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807877956
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
During the Civil War era, black and white North Carolinians were forced to fundamentally reinterpret the morality of suicide, divorce, and debt as these experiences became pressing issues throughout the region and nation. In Moments of Despair, David Silkenat explores these shifting sentiments. Antebellum white North Carolinians stigmatized suicide, divorce, and debt, but the Civil War undermined these entrenched attitudes, forcing a reinterpretation of these issues in a new social, cultural, and economic context in which they were increasingly untethered from social expectations. Black North Carolinians, for their part, used emancipation to lay the groundwork for new bonds of community and their own interpretation of social frameworks. Silkenat argues that North Carolinians' attitudes differed from those of people outside the South in two respects. First, attitudes toward these cultural practices changed more abruptly and rapidly in the South than in the rest of America, and second, the practices were interpreted through a prism of race. Drawing upon a robust and diverse body of sources, including insane asylum records, divorce petitions, bankruptcy filings, diaries, and personal correspondence, this innovative study describes a society turned upside down as a consequence of a devastating war.
Author: David Silkenat
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807877956
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309
Get Book Here
Book Description
During the Civil War era, black and white North Carolinians were forced to fundamentally reinterpret the morality of suicide, divorce, and debt as these experiences became pressing issues throughout the region and nation. In Moments of Despair, David Silkenat explores these shifting sentiments. Antebellum white North Carolinians stigmatized suicide, divorce, and debt, but the Civil War undermined these entrenched attitudes, forcing a reinterpretation of these issues in a new social, cultural, and economic context in which they were increasingly untethered from social expectations. Black North Carolinians, for their part, used emancipation to lay the groundwork for new bonds of community and their own interpretation of social frameworks. Silkenat argues that North Carolinians' attitudes differed from those of people outside the South in two respects. First, attitudes toward these cultural practices changed more abruptly and rapidly in the South than in the rest of America, and second, the practices were interpreted through a prism of race. Drawing upon a robust and diverse body of sources, including insane asylum records, divorce petitions, bankruptcy filings, diaries, and personal correspondence, this innovative study describes a society turned upside down as a consequence of a devastating war.
Author: Lindley S. Butler
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469667576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471
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Book Description
In this book, Lindley S. Butler traverses oft-noted but little understood events in the political and social establishment of the Carolina colony. In the wake of the English Civil Wars in the mid-seventeenth century, King Charles II granted charters to eight Lords Proprietors to establish civil structures, levy duties and taxes, and develop a vast tract of land along the southeastern Atlantic coast. Butler argues that unlike the New England theocracies and Chesapeake plantocracy, the isolated colonial settlements of the Albemarle—the cradle of today's North Carolina—saw their power originate neither in the authority of the church nor in wealth extracted through slave labor, but rather in institutions that emphasized political, legal, and religious freedom for white male landholders. Despite this distinct pattern of economic, legal, and religious development, however, the colony could not avoid conflict among the diverse assemblage of Indigenous, European, and African people living there, all of whom contributed to the future of the state and nation that took shape in subsequent years. Butler provides the first comprehensive history of the proprietary era in North Carolina since the nineteenth century, offering a substantial and accessible reappraisal of this key historical period.
Author: Elaine Frantz Parsons
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469625431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
The first comprehensive examination of the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan since the 1970s, Ku-Klux pinpoints the group's rise with startling acuity. Historians have traced the origins of the Klan to Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, but the details behind the group's emergence have long remained shadowy. By parsing the earliest descriptions of the Klan, Elaine Frantz Parsons reveals that it was only as reports of the Tennessee Klan's mysterious and menacing activities began circulating in northern newspapers that whites enthusiastically formed their own Klan groups throughout the South. The spread of the Klan was thus intimately connected with the politics and mass media of the North. Shedding new light on the ideas that motivated the Klan, Parsons explores Klansmen's appropriation of images and language from northern urban forms such as minstrelsy, burlesque, and business culture. While the Klan sought to retain the prewar racial order, the figure of the Ku-Klux became a joint creation of northern popular cultural entrepreneurs and southern whites seeking, perversely and violently, to modernize the South. Innovative and packed with fresh insight, Parsons' book offers the definitive account of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.
Author: Paul D. Escott
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469610965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
Many Excellent People examines the nature of North Carolina's social system, particularly race and class relations, power, and inequality, during the last half of the nineteenth century. Paul Escott portrays North Carolina's major social groups, focusing on the elite, the ordinary white farmers or workers, and the blacks, and analyzes their attitudes, social structure, and power relationships. Quoting frequently from a remarkable array of letters, journals, diaries, and other primary sources, he shows vividly the impact of the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Populism, and the rise of the New South industrialism on southern society. Working within the new social history and using detailed analyses of five representative counties, wartime violence, Ku Klux Klan membership, stock-law legislation, and textile mill records, Escott reaches telling conclusions on the interplay of race, class, and politics. Despite fundamental political and economic reforms, Escott argues, North Carolina's social system remained as hierarchical and undemocratic in 1900 as it had been in 1850.
Author: James D. Anderson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898880
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.
Author: Steven E. Nash
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146962625X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
In this illuminating study, Steven E. Nash chronicles the history of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the mountains of western North Carolina. Nash presents a complex story of the region's grappling with the war's aftermath, examining the persistent wartime loyalties that informed bitter power struggles between factions of white mountaineers determined to rule. For a brief period, an influx of federal governmental power enabled white anti-Confederates to ally with former slaves in order to lift the Republican Party to power locally and in the state as a whole. Republican success led to a violent response from a transformed class of elites, however, who claimed legitimacy from the antebellum period while pushing for greater integration into the market-oriented New South. Focusing on a region that is still underrepresented in the Reconstruction historiography, Nash illuminates the diversity and complexity of Appalachian political and economic machinations, while bringing to light the broad and complicated issues the era posed to the South and the nation as a whole.
Author: Nancy Cohen
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
Tracing the transformation of liberal political ideology from the end of the Civil War to the early twentieth century, Nancy Cohen offers a new interpretation of the origins and character of modern liberalism. She argues that the values and programs associated with modern liberalism were formulated not during the Progressive Era, as most accounts maintain, but earlier, in the very different social context of the Gilded Age. Integrating intellectual, social, cultural, and economic history, Cohen argues that the reconstruction of liberalism hinged on the reaction of postbellum liberals to social and labor unrest. As new social movements of workers and farmers arose and phrased their protests in the rhetoric of democratic producerism, liberals retreated from earlier commitments to an expansive vision of democracy. Redefining liberal ideas about citizenship and the state, says Cohen, they played a critical role in legitimating emergent corporate capitalism and politically insulating it from democratic challenge. As the social cost of economic globalization comes under international critical scrutiny, this book revisits the bitter struggles over the relationship between capitalism and democracy in post-Civil War America. The resolution of this problem offered by the new liberalism deeply influenced the progressives and has left an enduring legacy for twentieth-century American politics, Cohen argues.
Author: Karin Lorene Zipf
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807130452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
On an autumn day in 1866, Wiley Ambrose and Hepsey Saunders, two former slaves who lived as husband and wife, received a knock at their door. Three men from a plantation in Brunswick County, North Carolina, presented court-ordered apprenticeship papers authorizing the immediate seizure of the couple's daughters, fifteen-year-old Harriet and thirteen-year-old Eliza. After a brief stay in jail with other children, the sisters were sent to work as plantation servants and field hands until age twenty-one. With that startling example, Karin L. Zipf begins Labor of Innocents, the first comprehensive exploration of forced apprenticeship in North Carolina. Zipf refuses to nostalgically view apprenticeship as a benign form of vocational training for children and instead presents irrefutable evidence that the institution existed as a means to control the composition and character of families, to provide alternate sources of cheap labor, and to ensure a white patriarchal social order. Codified by law, involuntary apprenticeship allowed courts not only to define who was an unacceptable parent but also to indenture their children. Disproportionately affected were the poor. Zipf details the continual fluidity of the institution from its colonial origins to its twentieth-century demise. Over two hundred years, the definition of an unfit head of household variously included black men, any woman, and widowed or unmarried white women, depending upon the current social and political agenda of authorities. Parents of both races and sexes challenged the laws vigorously and repeatedly to no effect until progressive reforms ended apprenticeship in 1919 with passage of the Child Welfare Act. An impressive blend of legal, social, and labor history, Labor of Innocents illuminates past concepts of family and the realities families endured.
Author: Eric Foner
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006203586X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 742
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Book Description
From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America, with a new introduction from the author. Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed. Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period—an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.
Author: E. Merton Coulter
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807100080
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
This book is Volume VIII of A History of the South, a ten-volume series designed to present a thoroughly balanced history of all the complex aspects of the South's culture from 1607 to the present. Like its companion volumes, The South During Reconstruction is written by an outstanding student of Southern history, E. Merton Coulter, who is also one of the editors of the series.The tragic Reconstruction period still casts its long shadow over the South. In his study, Mr. Coulter looks beyond the familiar political and economic patterns into the more fundamental attitudes and activities of the people. In this dismal period of racial and political bitterness, little notice has been taken of the strivings for reorganization of agriculture under free labor, for industrial and transportation development, for a free-school system and higher education, and for the advance of religious, literary, and other cultural interests. Mr. Coulter's book shows these things to be very real, and they are related to the Radical program, which, conceived both in good and evil, ran its course and finally collapsed.This period forms an important chapter in American history. It is an account of a region, defeated in one of the world's great wars, struggling to rebuild its social and economic structure and to win back for itself a place in the reunited nation.
