Download or read book From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry 1850 1915 written by Stephen A. West and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, Stephen A. West revises understandings of the American South by offering a new perspective on two iconic figures in the region's social landscape. "Yeoman," a term of praise for the small landowning farmer, was commonly used during the antebellum era but ultimately eclipsed by "redneck," an epithet that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. In popular use, each served less as a precise class label than as a means to celebrate or denigrate the moral and civic worth of broad groups of white men. Viewing these richly evocative figures as ideological inventions rather than sociological realities, West examines the divisions they obscured and the conflicts that gave them such force. The setting for this impressively detailed study is the Upper Piedmont of South Carolina, the sort of upcountry region typically associated with the white "plain folk." West shows how the yeoman ideal played a vital role in proslavery discourse before the Civil War but poorly captured the realities of life, with important implications for how historians understand the politics of slavery and the drive for secession. After the Civil War, the South Carolina upcountry was convulsed by the economic transformations and political conflicts out of which the redneck was born. West reinterprets key developments in the history of the New South--such as the politics of lynching and the phenomenon of the "Southern demagogue"--and uncovers the historical roots of a stereotype that continues to loom large in popular understandings of the American South. Drawing together periods and topics often treated separately, West combines economic, social, and political history in an original and compelling account.

Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture written by Larry J. Griffin and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture offers a timely, authoritative, and interdisciplinary exploration of issues related to social class in the South from the colonial era to the present. With introductory essays by J. Wayne Flynt and by editors Larry J. Griffin and Peggy G. Hargis, the volume is a comprehensive, stand-alone reference to this complex subject, which underpins the history of the region and shapes its future. In 58 thematic essays and 103 topical entries, the contributors explore the effects of class on all aspects of life in the South--its role in Indian removal, the Civil War, the New Deal, and the civil rights movement, for example, and how it has been manifested in religion, sports, country and gospel music, and matters of gender. Artisans and the working class, indentured workers and steelworkers, the Freedmen's Bureau and the Knights of Labor are all examined. This volume provides a full investigation of social class in the region and situates class concerns at the center of our understanding of Southern culture.

Download or read book Our Country First Then Greenville written by Courtney L. Tollison Hartness and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Places Greenville's experience during World War I within the context of the progressive era to better understand the rise of this New South city Greenville, South Carolina has become an attractive destination, frequently included in lists of the "Best Small Cities" in America. While Greenville's twenty-first-century Renaissance has been impressive, in "Our Country First, Then Greenville," Courtney L. Tollison Hartness explores an earlier period, revealing how Greenville's experience during World War I served to generate massive development in the city and the region. It was this moment that catalyzed Greenville's development into a modern city, setting the stage for the continued growth that persists into the present-day. "Our Country First, Then Greenville" explores Greenville's home-front experience of race relations, dramatic population growth (the number of Greenville residents nearly tripled between 1900 and 1930s), the women's suffrage movement, and the contributions of African Americans and women to Greenville's history. This important work features photos of Greenville, found in archival collections throughout the country and dating back over one hundred years.

Download or read book Recovering the Piedmont Past written by Timothy P. Grady and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology exploring the modernization of the South Carolina upcountry and the region's role in creating the New South Continuing the theme of unexplored moments introduced in Recovering the Piedmont Past: Unexplored Moments in Nineteenth-Century Upcountry South Carolina History, Timothy P. Grady joins with Andrew H. Myers to edit this second anthology that uncovers the microhistory of this northwest region of the state. Topics include the influence of railroads on traveling circuses, tourist resorts and visits by Booker T. Washington during the rise of Jim Crow, pioneering efforts by progressives to identify the cause of pellagra disease, a debate over populism involving "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, the acculturation of Greek immigrants, and the daily lives of Civilian Conservation Corps workers during the New Deal. After years of being overshadowed by the coastal elite, upcountry South Carolinians began to play a vital role in modernizing the region and making it an integral part of the "New South." In a study of this shift in the balance of power, the contributors examine religious history, the economic boom and bust, popular recreational activities, and major trends that played out in small places. By providing details and nuance that illuminate the historical context of the New South and engaging with the upcountry from fresh angles, this second volume expresses a deep local interest while also speaking to broader political and social issues. Melissa Walker, the George Dean Johnson, Jr. Professor of History Emerita at Converse College and coeditor of Recovering the Piedmont Past: Unexplored Moments in Nineteenth-Century South Carolina History, provides a foreword.

Download or read book The Coming of Southern Prohibition written by Michael Lewis and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Coming of Southern Prohibition, Michael Lewis examines the rise and fall of South Carolina's state-run liquor dispensary system from its emergence in the 1890s until statewide prohibition in 1915. The dispensary system, requiring government-owned outlets to bottle and sell all alcohol, began as a way to both avoid prohibition and enrich governmental coffers. In this revealing study, Lewis offers a more complete rendering of South Carolina's path to universal prohibition and thus sharpens our understanding of historical southern attitudes towards race, religion, and alcohol. By focusing on the Aiken County border town of North Augusta, South Carolina, Lewis details how their lucrative dispensary operation -- which promised to both reduce alcohol consumption and generate funding for the county's cash-strapped government -- delayed statewide prohibition by nearly a decade. Aided by Georgia's adoption of dry laws in 1907, Aiken County profited from alcohol sales to Georgians crossing the state line to drink. Lewis shows, in fact, that the Aiken County dispensary at the foot of the bridge connecting South Carolina to Georgia sold more liquor than any other store in the state. Notwithstanding the moral debates surrounding temperance, the money resulting from dispensary sales helped pave roads, build parks and schools, and keep county and municipal taxes the lowest in South Carolina. The power of this revenue is notable, as Lewis reveals, given the rejection of prohibition laws voiced by the rural, native-born, Protestant population in Aiken County, which diverged from the sentiment of their peers in other parts of the region. Lewis's socio-cultural analysis, which includes the impact of adjacent mill villages and African American communities, employs statistical findings to reveal an interplay of political and economic factors that ultimately overwhelmed any profit margin and ushered in statewide prohibition in 1915. Original and enlightening, The Coming of Southern Prohibition explores a single community as it wrestled with the ethical and financial stakes of alcohol consumption and sale amid a national discourse that would dominate American life in the early twentieth century.

Download or read book Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry written by Bruce W. Eelman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry, Bruce W. Eelman follows the evolution of an entrepreneurial culture in a nineteenth-century southern community outside the plantation belt. Counter to the view that the Civil War and Reconstruction alone brought social and economic revolution to the South, Eelman finds that antebellum Spartanburg businessmen advocated a comprehensive vision for modernizing their region. Although their plans were forward looking, they still supported slavery and racial segregation. By the 1840s, Spartanburg merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, and other professionals were looking to capitalize on the area’s natural resources by promoting iron and textile mills and a network of rail lines. Recognizing that cultural change had to accompany material change, these businessmen also worked to reshape legal and educational institutions. Their prewar success was limited, largely due to lowcountry planters’ political power. However, their modernizing spirit would serve as an important foundation for postwar development. Although the Civil War brought unprecedented trauma to the Spartanburg community, the modernizing merchants, industrialists, and lawyers strengthened their political and social clout in the aftermath. As a result, much of the modernizing blueprint of the 1850s was realized in the 1870s. Eelman finds that Spartanburg’s modernizers slowed legal and educational reform only when its implementation seemed likely to empower African Americans.

Download or read book Threatening Property written by Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White supremacists determined what African Americans could do and where they could go in the Jim Crow South, but they were less successful in deciding where black people could live because different groups of white supremacists did not agree on the question of residential segregation. In Threatening Property, Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant investigates early-twentieth-century campaigns for residential segregation laws in North Carolina to show how the version of white supremacy supported by middle-class white people differed from that supported by the elites. Class divides prevented Jim Crow from expanding to the extent that it would require separate neighborhoods for black and white southerners as in apartheid South Africa. Herbin-Triant details the backlash against the economic successes of African Americans among middle-class whites, who claimed that they wished to protect property values and so campaigned for residential segregation laws both in the city and the countryside, where their actions were modeled on South Africa’s Natives Land Act. White elites blocked these efforts, primarily because it was against their financial interest to remove the black workers that they employed in their homes, farms, and factories. Herbin-Triant explores what the split over residential segregation laws reveals about competing versions of white supremacy and about the position of middling whites in a region dominated by elite planters and businessmen. An illuminating work of social and political history, Threatening Property puts class front and center in explaining conflict over the expansion of segregation laws into private property.

Download or read book The Civil War Guerrilla written by Joseph M. Beilein and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2015-04-03 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil War historians shed new light on the importance of guerrilla combat across the south in this “useful and fascinating work” (Choice). Touching states from Virginia to New Mexico, guerrilla warfare played a significant yet underexamined role in the Civil War. Guerrilla fighters fought for both the Union and the Confederacy—as well as their own ethnic groups, tribes, or families. They were deadly forces that plundered, tortured, and terrorized those in their path, and their impact is not yet fully understood. This richly diverse volume assembles a team of both rising and eminent scholars to examine guerrilla warfare in the South during the Civil War. Together, they discuss irregular combat as practiced by various communities in multiple contexts, including how it was used by Native Americans, the factors that motivated raiders in the border states, and the women who participated as messengers, informants, collaborators, and combatants. They also explore how the Civil War guerrilla has been mythologized in history, literature, and folklore.

Download or read book The British Gentry the Southern Planter and the Northern Family Farmer written by James L. Huston and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2015-05-04 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the history of the British gentry to explain the contrasting sentiments of American small farmers and plantation owners, James L. Huston's expansive analysis offers a new understanding of the socioeconomic factors that fueled sectionalism and ignited the American Civil War. This groundbreaking study of agriculture's role in the war defies long-held notions that northern industrialization and urbanization led to clashes between North and South. Rather, Huston argues that the ideological chasm between plantation owners in the South and family farmers in the North led to the political eruption of 1854-56 and the birth of a sectionalized party system. Huston shows that over 70 percent of the northern population-by far the dominant economic and social element-had close ties to agriculture. More invested in egalitarianism and personal competency than in capitalism, small farmers in the North operated under a free labor ideology that emphasized the ideals of independence and mastery over oneself. The ideology of the plantation, by contrast, reflected the conservative ethos of the British aristocracy, which was the product of immense landed inequality and the assertion of mastery over others. By examining the dominant populations in northern and southern congressional districts, Huston reveals that economic interests pitted the plantation South against the small-farm North. The northern shift toward Republicanism depended on farmers, not industrialists: While Democrats won the majority of northern farm congressional districts from 1842 to 1853, they suffered a major defection of these districts from 1854 to 1856, to the antislavery organizations that would soon coalesce into the Republican Party. Utilizing extensive historical research and close examination of the voting patterns in congressional districts across the country, James Huston provides a remarkable new context for the origins of the Civil War.

Download or read book Standing Their Ground written by Adrienne Monteith Petty and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation of agriculture was one of the most far-reaching developments of the modern era. In analyzing how and why this change took place in the United States, scholars have most often focused on Midwestern family farmers, who experienced the change during the first half of the twentieth century, and southern sharecroppers, swept off the land by forces beyond their control. Departing from the conventional story, this book focuses on small farm owners in North Carolina from the post-Civil War era to the post-Civil Rights era. It reveals that the transformation was more protracted and more contested than historians have understood it to be. Even though the number of farm owners gradually declined over the course of the century, the desire to farm endured among landless farmers, who became landowners during key moments of opportunity. Moreover, this book departs from other studies by considering all farm owners as a single class, rejecting the widespread approach of segregating black farm owners. The violent and restrictive political culture of Jim Crow regime, far from only affecting black farmers, limited the ability of all farmers to resist changes in agriculture. By the 1970s, the vast reduction in the number of small farm owners had simultaneously destroyed a Southern yeomanry that had been the symbol of American democracy since the time of Thomas Jefferson, rolled back gains in landownership that families achieved during the first half century after the Civil War, and remade the rural South from an agrarian society to a site of global agribusiness.

Download or read book Southern Communities written by Steven E. Nash and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Community is an evolving and complex concept that historians have applied to localities, counties, and the South as a whole in order to ground larger issues in the day-to-day lives of all segments of society. These social networks sometimes unite and sometimes divide people, they can mirror or transcend political boundaries, and they may exist solely within the cultures of like-minded people. This volume explores the nature of southern communities during the long nineteenth century. The contributors build on the work of scholars who have allowed us to see community not simply as a place but instead as an idea in a constant state of definition and redefinition. They reaffirm that there never has been a singular southern community. As editors Steven E. Nash and Bruce E. Stewart reveal, southerners have constructed an array of communities across the region and beyond. Nor do the contributors idealize these communities. Far from being places of cooperation and harmony, southern communities were often rife with competition and discord. Indeed, conflict has constituted a vital part of southern communal development. Taken together, the essays in this volume remind us how community-focused studies can bring us closer to answering those questions posed to Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!: "Tell [us] about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."

Download or read book The Violent World of Broadus Miller written by Kevin W. Young and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1927, an itinerant Black laborer named Broadus Miller was accused of killing a fifteen-year-old white girl in Morganton, North Carolina. Miller became the target of a massive manhunt lasting nearly two weeks. After he was gunned down in the North Carolina mountains, his body was taken back to Morganton and publicly displayed on the courthouse lawn on a Sunday afternoon, attracting thousands of spectators. Kevin W. Young vividly illustrates the violence-wracked world of the early twentieth century in the Carolinas, the world that created both Miller and the hunters who killed him. Young provides a panoramic overview of this turbulent time, telling important contextual histories of events that played into this tragic story, including the horrific prison conditions of the era, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the influx of Black immigrants into North Carolina. More than an account of a single murder case, this book vividly illustrates the stormy race relations in the Carolinas during the early 1900s, reminding us that the legacy of this era lingers into the present.

Download or read book Between Slavery and Capitalism written by Martin Ruef and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds ... In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, Ruef draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports. Through a resolutely comparative approach, Between Slavery and Capitalism identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today."--Publisher's Web site.

Download or read book White Trash written by Nancy Isenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller, with a new preface from the author “This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the truths that matter.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times “This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.”—O, The Oprah Magazine “White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.” —T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg, co-author of The Problem of Democracy, takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash. “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters that put Trump in the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.

Download or read book The Thirteenth Turn written by Jack Shuler and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a rope, a symbol, and rough justice in America. The hangman's knot is a simple thing to tie, just a rope carefully coiled around itself up to thirteen times. But in those thirteen turns lie a powerful symbol, one that is all too deeply connected to America's past -- and present. The last man to be hanged in the United States was Billy Bailey, who was executed in Delaware in 1996 for committing a double murder. Even today, hanging is still legal, in certain situations, in New Hampshire and Washington. And the noose remains a potent cultural symbol. An incident in Jena, Louisiana, in 2006, in which nooses were used to menace black students, made national news. Yet little has changed: according to author Jack Shuler, there have been nearly 100 "noose incidents" just in the last two years. The Thirteenth Turn unravels these stories, from Judas Iscariot, perhaps the most infamous hanged man, to the killing of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the murderers at the heart of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and beyond. In his travels across America, Shuler traces the evolution of this dark practice. As he investigates the death of John Brown, or the 1930 lynching that inspired the song "Strange Fruit," he finds that the very places that perpetrated these acts now seek to forget them. Shuler's account is a kind of shadow history of America: a reminder that vigilantes and hangmen play a crucial role in our national story. The Thirteenth Turn is a courageous and searching book that reminds us where we come from, and what is lost if we forget.

Download or read book Contested Loyalty written by Robert M. Sandow and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embroiled in the Civil War, northerners wrote and spoke with frequency about the subject of loyalty. The word was common in newspaper articles, political pamphlets, and speeches, appeared on flags, broadsides, and prints, was written into diaries and letters and the stationary they appeared on, and even found its way into sermons. Its ubiquity suggests that loyalty was an important concept...but what did it mean to those who used it? Contested Loyalty examines the significance of loyalty across fault lines of gender, social class, and education, race and ethnicity, and political or religious affiliation. These differing vantage points reveal the complicated ways in which loyalties were defined, prioritized, acted upon, and related. While most of the scholarly work on Civil War Era nationalism has focused on southern identity and Confederate nationhood, the essays in Contested Loyalty examine the variable, fluid constructions of these concepts in the north. Essays explore the limitations and incomplete nature of national loyalty and how disparate groups struggled to control its meaning. The authors move beyond the narrow partisan debate over Democratic dissent to examine other challenges to and competing interpretations of national loyalty. Today’s leading and emerging scholars examine loyalty through: the frame of politics at the state and national level; the viewpoints of college educated men as well as the women they courted; the attitudes of northern Protestant churches on issues of patriotism and loyalty; working class men and women in military industries; how employers could use the language of loyalty to take away the rights of workers; and the meaning of loyalty in contexts of race and ethnicity. The Union cause was a powerful ideology committing millions of citizens, in the ranks and at home, to a long and bloody war. But loyalty to the Union cause imperfectly explains how citizens reacted to the traumas of war or the ways in which conflicting loyalties played out in everyday life. The essays in this collection point us down the path of greater understanding.

Download or read book Missing Links written by Jeremy Rich and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeremy Rich uses the eccentric life of R. L. Garner (1848–1920) to examine the commercial networks that brought the first apes to America during the Progressive Era, a critical time in the development of ideas about African wildlife, race, and evolution. Garner was a self-taught zoologist and atheist from southwest Virginia. Starting in 1892, he lived on and off in the French colony of Gabon, studying primates and trying to engage U.S. academics with his theories. Most prominently, Garner claimed that he could teach apes to speak human languages and that he could speak the languages of primates. Garner brought some of the first live primates to America, launching a traveling demonstration in which he claimed to communicate with a chimpanzee named Susie. He was often mocked by the increasingly professionalized scientific community, who were wary of his colorful escapades, such as his ill-fated plan to make a New York City socialite the queen of southern Gabon, and his efforts to convince Thomas Edison to finance him in Africa. Yet Garner did influence evolutionary debates, and as with many of his era, race dominated his thinking. Garner's arguments—for example, that chimpanzees were more loving than Africans, or that colonialism constituted a threat to the separation of the races—offer a fascinating perspective on the thinking and attitudes of his times. Missing Links explores the impact of colonialism on Africans, the complicated politics of buying and selling primates, and the popularization of biological racism.