Download or read book Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics written by Michael L. Lanza and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1999-03-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the close of the Civil War, the Federal government undertook a sweeping reform of land tenure in the South with the passage of the Southern Homestead Act of 1866. Designed primarily to allow freedmen to settle public land and take part in the great agrarian program of establishing a nation of independent yeoman farmers, the act soon became the victim of political abuses, bureaucratic ineptitude, and burgeoning racism. In Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics, Michael L. Lanza studies the conception, evolution, and demise of this critical aspect of Reconstruction history.Lanza deals with the formulation of the act in Congress, the implementation of new land regulations in the southern states, and the distribution of land to the hopeful body of southern freedmen. As Lanza points out, however, the homesteaders faced obstacles and disappointments at almost every turn. White southerners vehemently opposed black landownership and did everything possible to stand in the freemen's way. Furthermore, much of the land allocated to the homesteaders proved unfarmable. An unwieldy, sometimes dishonest bureaucracy and a lessening of support from the Republican party were additional barriers that prevented the Southern Homestead Act from living up to its promise. Lanza relies on letters written by many homesteaders to paint a vivid picture of their hopes, frustrations, achievements, and failures.Historians have long debated the centrality of land distribution policies to Reconstruction history. But until now one has fully considered the single most important measure adopted during Reconstruction to provide land to the landless. Drawing on records of the General Land Office, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and other sources, Michael Lanza's study of the Southern Homestead Act provides a significant new interpretation of land policy during this era.
Download or read book An Agrarian Republic written by Adam Wesley Dean and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-02-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The familiar story of the Civil War tells of a predominately agricultural South pitted against a rapidly industrializing North. However, Adam Wesley Dean argues that the Republican Party's political ideology was fundamentally agrarian. Believing that small farms owned by families for generations led to a model society, Republicans supported a northern agricultural ideal in opposition to southern plantation agriculture, which destroyed the land's productivity, required constant western expansion, and produced an elite landed gentry hostile to the Union. Dean shows how agrarian republicanism shaped the debate over slavery's expansion, spurred the creation of the Department of Agriculture and the passage of the Homestead Act, and laid the foundation for the development of the earliest nature parks. Spanning the long nineteenth century, Dean's study analyzes the changing debate over land development as it transitioned from focusing on the creation of a virtuous and orderly citizenry to being seen primarily as a "civilizing" mission. By showing Republicans as men and women with backgrounds in small farming, Dean unveils new connections between seemingly separate historical events, linking this era's views of natural and manmade environments with interpretations of slavery and land policy.
Download or read book Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest written by William Ivy Hair and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1969-10-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have come to think on the late nineteenth century as America’s Gilded Age. But in Louisiana it was a time of conflict and repression—turbulent years which engendered the social and political forces that ultimately produced the Huey Long era. Professor William Ivy Hair has captured the essence of Louisiana life and politics during this era, the decades that followed the end of Reconstruction. Using many quotations from newspapers and other relevant sources, the author has recreated in a readable narrative not only the political developments but the flavor of contemporary life and the prevalent emotions of the period. He focuses on the two major opposing forces in the state during the era: the conservative Bourbon oligarchy and the various protest movements of disadvantaged whites and blacks. To provide a background for a perceptive understanding of this political conflict, he undertakes a broad-gauged examination of the social, economic, and racial conditions in the state from 1877 to 1900. Beginning with the sordid story of the events surrounding the end of Reconstruction, Hair examines and analyzes the Democratic oligarchy, the leading personalities involved, and its several factions. He examines the economic and social conditions of both rural and urban Louisiana, and discusses the Greenback-agrarian upheaval of 1878, the larger protest movement that followed, the attempted mass Negro exodus from the state during the so-called “Kansas Fever” of 1879, the spread of the Farmers’ Union and Alliance of the 1880's, and the rise of Populism in the 1890's. Having crushed Greenbackism and related independent movements, Hair says, the Bourbon oligarchy proceeded to fasten upon Louisiana what was probably the most reactionary and least socially responsible regime in the history of the post-Civil War South. Bourbanism and Agrarian Protest combines thorough scholarly research and clear, perceptive writing. It covers every issue and every event of consequence of the era and is an excellent sequel to Roger W. Shugg’s Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana, which treats the period from 1840 to 1875.
Download or read book Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy written by Stephen Kantrowitz and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state's black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South. Friend and foe alike--and generations of historians--interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life.
Download or read book Andrew Johnson and the Failure of the Agrarian Dream written by Kenneth Milton Stampp and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reunion and Reaction written by C. Vann Woodward and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the era of America's landmark antebellum compromises and that of the Compromise of 1877, a war had intervened, destroying the integrity of the Southern system but failing to determine the New South's relation to the Union. While it did not restore the old order in the South, or restore the South to parity with the Union, it did lay down the political foundations for reunion, bring Reconstruction to an end, and shape the future of four million freedmen. Originally published in 1951, this classic work by one of America's foremost experts on Southern history presents an important new interpretation of the Compromise, forcing historians to revise previous attitudes towards the Reconstruction period, the history of the Republican party, and the realignment of forces that fought the Civil War. Because much of the negotiating occurred in secrecy, historians have known less about this Compromise than others before it. Now reissued with a new introduction by Woodward, Reunion and Reaction gives us the other half of the story.
Download or read book The Other Greeks written by Victor Davis Hanson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-12-22 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victor Hanson shows that the "Greek revolution" was not the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, but rather the historic innovation of the independent family farm."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Black Reconstruction in America The Oxford W E B Du Bois written by W. E. B. Du Bois and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of the twenty years of Reconstruction from the point of view of newly liberated African Americans. Though lambasted by critics at the time of its publication in 1935, Black Reconstruction has only grown in historical and literary importance. In the 1960s it joined the canon of the most influential revisionist historical works. Its greatest achievement is weaving a credible, lyrical historical narrative of the hostile and politically fraught years of 1860-1880 with a powerful critical analysis of the harmful effects of democracy, including Jim Crow laws and other injustices. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by David Levering Lewis, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.
Download or read book Reconstruction written by Eric Foner and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 1025 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule written by Debra A. Reid and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2012-06-10 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection chronicles the tumultuous history of landowning African American farmers from the end of the Civil War to today. Each essay provides a case study of people in one place at a particular time and the factors that affected their ability to acquire, secure, and protect their land. The contributors walk readers through a century and a half of African American agricultural history, from the strivings of black farm owners in the immediate post-emancipation period to the efforts of contemporary black farm owners to receive justice through the courts for decades of discrimination by the U.S Department of Agriculture. They reveal that despite enormous obstacles, by 1920 a quarter of African American farm families owned their land, and demonstrate that farm ownership was not simply a departure point for black migrants seeking a better life but a core component of the African American experience.
Download or read book Agroecology written by Peter Rosset and published by Practical Action. This book was released on 2017 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : why agroecology? -- The scientific principles of agroecology -- The scientific evidence for agroecology : can it feed the world? -- Scaling up agroecology : social process and organization -- The politics of agroecology -- Conclusions : conform or transform?
Download or read book Reconstructing Appalachia written by Andrew L. Slap and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2010-05-28 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Excellent, readable, and absorbing history . . . gives us a better understanding of this compelling aspect of the Civil War.” —Library Journal Families, communities, and the nation itself were irretrievably altered by the Civil War and the subsequent societal transformations of the nineteenth century. The repercussions of the war incited a broad range of unique problems in Appalachia, including political dynamics, racial prejudices, and the regional economy. This anthology of essays reveals life in Appalachia after the ravages of the Civil War, an unexplored area that has left a void in historical literature. Addressing a gap in the chronicles of our nation, this vital collection explores little-known aspects of history with a particular focus on the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods. Acclaimed scholars John C. Inscoe, Gordon B. McKinney, and Ken Fones-Wolf are joined by up-and-comers like Mary Ella Engel, Anne E. Marshall, and Kyle Osborn in a unique volume investigating postwar Appalachia with clarity and precision. Featuring a broad geographic focus, the compelling essays cover postwar events in Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. This approach provides an intimate portrait of Appalachia as a diverse collection of communities where the values of place and family are of crucial importance. Highlighting a wide array of topics including racial reconciliation, tension between former Unionists and Confederates, the evolution of post—Civil War memory, and altered perceptions of race, gender, and economic status, Reconstructing Appalachia is a timely and essential study of a region rich in heritage and tradition. “Outstanding.” —North Carolina Historical Review
Download or read book A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction written by Laura F. Edwards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a succinct and accessible account of the critical role of legal and constitutional issues of the American Civil War.
Download or read book West from Appomattox written by Heather Cox Richardson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-28 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This thoughtful, engaging examination of the Reconstruction Era . . . will be appealing . . . to anyone interested in the roots of present-day American politics” (Publishers Weekly). The story of Reconstruction is not simply about the rebuilding of the South after the Civil War. In many ways, the late nineteenth century defined modern America, as Southerners, Northerners, and Westerners forged a national identity that united three very different regions into a country that could become a world power. A sweeping history of the United States from the era of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, this engaging book tracks the formation of the American middle class while stretching the boundaries of our understanding of Reconstruction. Historian Heather Cox Richardson ties the North and West into the post–Civil War story that usually focuses narrowly on the South. By weaving together the experiences of real individuals who left records in their own words—from ordinary Americans such as a plantation mistress, a Native American warrior, and a labor organizer, to prominent historical figures such as Andrew Carnegie, Julia Ward Howe, Booker T. Washington, and Sitting Bull—Richardson tells a story about the creation of modern America.
Download or read book The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era written by Utsa Patnaik and published by Fahamu/Pambazuka. This book was released on 2011-10-13 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling and critical destruction of both the English agricultural revolution and the theory of comparative advantage, upon which unequal trade has been justified for three centuries, this account argues that these ideas have been used to disguise the fact that the Northfrom the time of colonialism to the present dayhas used the much greater agricultural productivity of the South to feed and improve the living standards of its own people while impoverishing the South. At the same time, the imposition of neoliberal reforms in the African continent has led to greater unemployment, spiraling debt, land and livestock losses, reduced per capita food production, and decreased nutrition. Arguing that political stability hangs in the balance, this book calls for labor-intensive small-scale production, new thinking about which agricultural commodities are produced, the redistribution of the means of food production, and increased investment in rural development. The combined effort of African and Indian scholarly work, this account demands policies that defend the land rights of small producers and allow people to live with dignity. "
Download or read book The Republic for which it Stands written by Richard White and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 964 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The newest volume in the Oxford History of the United States series, The Republic for Which It Stands argues that the Gilded Age, along with Reconstruction--its conflicts, rapid and disorienting change, hopes and fears--formed the template of American modernity.
Download or read book The Risen Phoenix written by Luis-Alejandro Dinnella-Borrego and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Risen Phoenix charts the changing landscape of black politics and political culture in the postwar South by focusing on the careers of six black congressmen who served between the Civil War and the turn of the nineteenth century: John Mercer Langston of Virginia, James Thomas Rapier of Alabama, Robert Smalls of South Carolina, John Roy Lynch of Mississippi, Josiah Thomas Walls of Florida, and George Henry White of North Carolina. Drawing on a rich combination of traditional political history, gender and black history, and the history of U.S. foreign relations, the book argues that African American congressmen effectively served their constituents’ interests while also navigating their way through a tumultuous post–Civil War Southern political environment. Black congressmen represented their constituents by advancing a policy agenda encompassing strong civil rights protections, economic modernization, and expanded access to education. Local developments such as antiblack aggression and violent electoral contests shaped the policies supported by newly elected black congressmen, including the tactical decision to support amnesty for ex-Confederates. Yet black congressmen ultimately embraced their role as national leaders and as spokesmen not only for their congressional districts and states but for all African Americans throughout the South. As these black leaders searched for effective ways to respond to white supremacy, disenfranchisement, segregation, and lynching, they challenged the barriers of prejudice, paving the way for future black struggles for equality in the twentieth century.
