Download or read book Paths Out of Dixie written by Robert Mickey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-22 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation of the American South--from authoritarian to democratic rule--is the most important political development since World War II. It has re-sorted voters into parties, remapped presidential elections, and helped polarize Congress. Most important, it is the final step in America's democratization. Paths Out of Dixie illuminates this sea change by analyzing the democratization experiences of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Robert Mickey argues that Southern states, from the 1890s until the early 1970s, constituted pockets of authoritarian rule trapped within and sustained by a federal democracy. These enclaves--devoted to cheap agricultural labor and white supremacy--were established by conservative Democrats to protect their careers and clients. From the abolition of the whites-only Democratic primary in 1944 until the national party reforms of the early 1970s, enclaves were battered and destroyed by a series of democratization pressures from inside and outside their borders. Drawing on archival research, Mickey traces how Deep South rulers--dissimilar in their internal conflict and political institutions--varied in their responses to these challenges. Ultimately, enclaves differed in their degree of violence, incorporation of African Americans, and reconciliation of Democrats with the national party. These diverse paths generated political and economic legacies that continue to reverberate today. Focusing on enclave rulers, their governance challenges, and the monumental achievements of their adversaries, Paths Out of Dixie shows how the struggles of the recent past have reshaped the South and, in so doing, America's political development.
Download or read book Paths Out of Dixie written by Robert Mickey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation of the American South--from authoritarian to democratic rule--is the most important political development since World War II. It has re-sorted voters into parties, remapped presidential elections, and helped polarize Congress. Most important, it is the final step in America's democratization. Paths Out of Dixie illuminates this sea change by analyzing the democratization experiences of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Robert Mickey argues that Southern states, from the 1890s until the early 1970s, constituted pockets of authoritarian rule trapped within and sustained by a federal democracy. These enclaves--devoted to cheap agricultural labor and white supremacy--were established by conservative Democrats to protect their careers and clients. From the abolition of the whites-only Democratic primary in 1944 until the national party reforms of the early 1970s, enclaves were battered and destroyed by a series of democratization pressures from inside and outside their borders. Drawing on archival research, Mickey traces how Deep South rulers--dissimilar in their internal conflict and political institutions--varied in their responses to these challenges. Ultimately, enclaves differed in their degree of violence, incorporation of African Americans, and reconciliation of Democrats with the national party. These diverse paths generated political and economic legacies that continue to reverberate today. Focusing on enclave rulers, their governance challenges, and the monumental achievements of their adversaries, Paths Out of Dixie shows how the struggles of the recent past have reshaped the South and, in so doing, America's political development.
Download or read book Dixie Dharma written by Jeff Wilson and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhism in the United States is often viewed in connection with practitioners in the Northeast and on the West Coast, but in fact, it has been spreading and evolving throughout the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. In Dixie Dharma, Jeff Wilson argues that region is crucial to understanding American Buddhism. Through the lens of a multidenominational Buddhist temple in Richmond, Virginia, Wilson explores how Buddhists are adapting to life in the conservative evangelical Christian culture of the South, and how traditional Southerners are adjusting to these newer members on the religious landscape. Introducing a host of overlooked characters, including Buddhist circuit riders, modernist Pure Land priests, and pluralistic Buddhists, Wilson shows how regional specificity manifests itself through such practices as meditation vigils to heal the wounds of the slave trade. He argues that southern Buddhists at once use bodily practices, iconography, and meditation tools to enact distinct sectarian identities even as they enjoy a creative hybridity.
Download or read book Deep Roots written by Avidit Acharya and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Despite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to support Republican candidates, gun rights, and the death penalty, and southern whites harbor higher levels of racial resentment than whites in other parts of the country. Why haven't these sentiments evolved or changed? Deep Roots shows that the entrenched political and racial views of contemporary white southerners are a direct consequence of the region's slaveholding history, which continues to shape economic, political, and social spheres. Today, southern whites who live in areas once reliant on slavery--compared to areas that were not--are more racially hostile and less amenable to policies that could promote black progress. Highlighting the connection between historical institutions and contemporary political attitudes, the authors explore the period following the Civil War when elite whites in former bastions of slavery had political and economic incentives to encourage the development of anti-black laws and practices. Deep Roots shows that these forces created a local political culture steeped in racial prejudice, and that these viewpoints have been passed down over generations, from parents to children and via communities, through a process called behavioral path dependence. While legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act made huge strides in increasing economic opportunity and reducing educational disparities, southern slavery has had a profound, lasting, and self-reinforcing influence on regional and national politics that can still be felt today. A groundbreaking look at the ways institutions of the past continue to sway attitudes of the present, Deep Roots demonstrates how social beliefs persist long after the formal policies that created those beliefs have been eradicated."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Unsolid South written by Devin Caughey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Jim Crow era, the Democratic Party dominated the American South, presiding over a racially segregated society while also playing an outsized role in national politics. In this compelling book, Devin Caughey provides an entirely new understanding of electoral competition and national representation in this exclusionary one-party enclave. Challenging the notion that the Democratic Party’s political monopoly inhibited competition and served only the Southern elite, he demonstrates how Democratic primaries—even as they excluded African Americans—provided forums for ordinary whites to press their interests. Focusing on politics during and after the New Deal, Caughey shows that congressional primary elections effectively substituted for partisan competition, in part because the spillover from national party conflict helped compensate for the informational deficits of elections without party labels. Caughey draws on a broad range of historical and quantitative evidence, including archival materials, primary election returns, congressional voting records, and hundreds of early public opinion polls that illuminate ideological patterns in the Southern public. Defying the received wisdom, this evidence reveals that members of Congress from the one-party South were no less responsive to their electorates than members from states with true partisan competition. Reinterpreting a critical period in American history, The Unsolid South reshapes our understanding of the role of parties in democratic theory and sheds critical new light on electoral politics in authoritarian regimes.
Download or read book Confronting Jim Crow written by Robert Cohen and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2024-08-27 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the onset of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, America has grappled with its racial history, leading to the removal of statues and other markers commemorating pro-slavery sympathizers and segregationists from public spaces. Some of these white supremacist statues had stood on or near college and university campuses since the Jim Crow era, symbolizing the reluctance of American higher education to confront its racist past. In Confronting Jim Crow, Robert Cohen explores the University of Georgia's long history of racism and the struggle to overcome it, shedding light on white Georgia's historical amnesia concerning the university's role in sustaining the Jim Crow system. By extending the historical analysis beyond the desegregation crisis of 1961, Cohen unveils UGA's deep-rooted anti-Black stance preceding formal desegregation efforts. Through the lens of Black and white student, faculty, and administration perspectives, this book exposes the enduring impact of Jim Crow and its lingering effects on campus integration.
Download or read book Boundary Control written by Edward L. Gibson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The democratization of a national government is only a first step in diffusing democracy throughout a country's territory. Even after a national government is democratized, subnational authoritarian 'enclaves' often continue to deny rights to citizens of local jurisdictions. Gibson offers new theoretical perspectives for the study of democratization in his exploration of this phenomenon. His theory of 'boundary control' captures the conflict pattern between incumbents and oppositions when a national democratic government exists alongside authoritarian provinces (or 'states'). He also reveals how federalism and the territorial organization of countries shape how subnational authoritarian regimes are built and how they unravel. Through a novel comparison of the late nineteenth-century American 'Solid South' with contemporary experiences in Argentina and Mexico, Gibson reveals that the mechanisms of boundary control are reproduced across countries and historical periods. As long as subnational authoritarian governments coexist with national democratic governments, boundary control will be at play.
Download or read book A Savage Order written by Rachel Kleinfeld and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most violent places in the world today are not at war. They are instead buckling under a maelstrom of gangs, organized crime, political conflict, corruption, and state brutality. Such devastating violence can feel hopeless, yet some places—from Colombia to the Republic of Georgia—have been able to recover. Taking on existing literature and popular theories about war, crime, and foreign intervention, A Savage Order is a blistering yet inspiring investigation into what makes some countries peaceful and others war zones, and a blueprint for what we can do to help. Drawing on fifteen years of study and firsthand field research—interviewing generals, former guerrillas, activists, politicians, and law enforcement in countries around the world—Rachel Kleinfeld tells the stories of societies, including our own, that successfully fought seemingly ingrained violence and offers penetrating conclusions about what must be done to build governments that are able to protect the lives of their citizens.
Download or read book How Democracies Die written by Steven Levitsky and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Time • Foreign Affairs • WBUR • Paste Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved. Praise for How Democracies Die “What we desperately need is a sober, dispassionate look at the current state of affairs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two of the most respected scholars in the field of democracy studies, offer just that.”—The Washington Post “Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.”—Ezra Klein, Vox “If you only read one book for the rest of the year, read How Democracies Die. . . .This is not a book for just Democrats or Republicans. It is a book for all Americans. It is nonpartisan. It is fact based. It is deeply rooted in history. . . . The best commentary on our politics, no contest.”—Michael Morrell, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (via Twitter) “A smart and deeply informed book about the ways in which democracy is being undermined in dozens of countries around the world, and in ways that are perfectly legal.”—Fareed Zakaria, CNN
Download or read book Illiberal Practices written by Jacqueline Behrend and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What drives the uneven distribution of democratic practices at the subnational level? Within subunits of a democratic federation, lasting political practices that restrict choice, limit debate, and exclude or distort democratic participation have been analyzed in recent scholarship as subnational authoritarianism. Once a critical number of citizens or regions band together in these practices, they can leverage illiberal efforts at the federal level. This timely, data-driven book compares federations that underwent transitions in the first, second, and third waves of democratization and offers a substantial expansion of the concept of subnational authoritarianism. The eleven expert political scientists featured in this text examine the nature and scope of subnational democratic variations within six large federations, including the United States, India, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Russia. Illiberal Practices makes the case that subnational units are more likely to operate by means of illiberal structures and practices than as fully authoritarian regimes. Detailed case studies examine uneven levels of citizenship in each federal system. These are distributed unequally across the different regions of the country and display semi-democratic or hybrid characteristics. Appropriate for scholars and students of democratization, authoritarianism, federalism, decentralization, and comparative politics, Illiberal Practices sheds light on the uneven extension of democracy within countries that have already democratized. Contributors: Jacqueline Behrend, André Borges, Julián Durazo Herrmann, Carlos Gervasoni, Edward L. Gibson, Desmond King, Inga A.-L. Saikkonen, Celina Souza, Maya Tudor, Laurence Whitehead, Adam Ziegfeld
Download or read book World War II and American Racial Politics written by Steven White and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War II played an important role in the trajectory of race and American political development, but the War's effects were much more complex than many assume. Steven White offers an extensive analysis of rarely utilized survey data and archival evidence to assess white racial attitudes and the executive branch response to civil rights advocacy. He finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the white mass public's racial policy attitudes largely did not liberalize during the war against Nazi Germany. In this context, advocates turned their attention to the possibility of unilateral action by the president, emphasizing a wartime civil rights agenda focused on discrimination in the defense industry and segregation in the military. This book offers a reinterpretation of this critical period in American political development, as well as implications for the theoretical relationship between war and the inclusion of marginalized groups in democratic societies.
Download or read book Hattiesburg written by William Sturkey and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize Benjamin L. Hooks Award Finalist “An insightful, powerful, and moving book.” —Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice “Sturkey’s clear-eyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement.” —New York Times If you really want to understand Jim Crow—what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it—you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can still see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. Hattiesburg takes us into the heart of this divided town and deep into the lives of families on both sides of the racial divide to show how the fabric of their existence was shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South. “Sturkey’s magnificent portrait reminds us that Mississippi is no anachronism. It is the dark heart of American modernity.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk “When they are at their best, historians craft powerful, compelling, often genre-changing pieces of history...William Sturkey is one of those historians...A brilliant, poignant work.” —Charles W. McKinney, Jr., Journal of African American History
Download or read book Race and the Greening of Atlanta written by Christopher C. Sellers and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race and the Greening of Atlanta turns an environmental lens on Atlanta’s ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city’s variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of “the environment.” Arising out of Atlanta’s Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism’s undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South. Placing these two movements on the same historical page, Christopher C. Sellers spotlights those environmental inequities, ideals, and provocations that catalyzed their divergent political projects. He then follows the intermittent, sometimes vital alliances they struck as civil rights activists tackled poverty, as a new environmental state arose, and as Black politicians began winning elections. Into the 1980s, as a wealth-concentrating style of capitalism returned to the city and Atlanta became a national “poster child” for sprawl, the seedbeds spread both for a national environmental justice movement and for an influential new style of antistatism. Sellers contends that this new conservativism, sweeping the South with an antienvironmentalism and budding white nationalism that echoed the region’s Jim Crow past, once again challenged the democracy Atlantans had achieved.
Download or read book Home Front Battles written by Charles C. Bolton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Home Front Battles examines the many effects of World War II economic and military mobilization on the Deep South. It also underscores one of the primary home front battles, which began with the passage of the Selective Training and Service Act in 1940 and the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee in 1941, banning discriminatory military training and employment practices and making it clear that the federal government would be promoting the ideal of nondiscrimination as part of its wartime mobilization efforts. In the Deep South, where race relations were already tense, these directives and southern tradition clashed.
Download or read book Reforming Jim Crow written by Kimberley Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-16 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of the Civil Rights era typically treat the key events of the 1950s Brown v. Board of Education, sit-ins, bus boycotts, and marches--as a revolutionary social upheaval that upended a rigid caste system. While the 1950s was a watershed era in Southern and civil rights history, the tendency has been to paint the preceding Jim Crow era as a brutal system that featured none of the progressive reform impulses so apparent at the federal level and in the North. As Kimberley Johnson shows in this pathbreaking reappraisal of the Jim Crow era, this argument is too simplistic, and is true to neither the 1950s nor the long era of Jim Crow that finally solidified in 1910. Focusing on the political development of the South between 1910 and 1954, Johnson considers the genuine efforts by white and black progressives to reform the system without destroying it. These reformers assumed that the system was there to stay, and therefore felt that they had to work within it in order to modernize the South. Consequently, white progressives tried to install a better--meaning more equitable--separate-but-equal system, and elite black reformers focused on ameliorative (rather than confrontational) solutions that would improve the lives of African Americans. Johnson concentrates on local and state reform efforts throughout the South in areas like schooling, housing, and labor. Many of the reforms made a difference, but they had the ironic impact of generating more demand for social change among blacks. She is able to show how demands slowly rose over time, and how the system laid the seeds of its own destruction. The reformers' commitment to a system that was less unequal--albeit not truly equal--and more like the North led to significant policy changes over time. As Johnson powerfully demonstrates, our lack of knowledge about the cumulative policy transformations resulting from the Jim Crow reform impulse impoverishes our understanding of the Civil Rights revolution. Reforming Jim Crow rectifies that.
Download or read book The False Cause written by Adam H. Domby and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early twentieth century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals here, this was not only an insidious goal; it was founded on falsehoods. The False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day. Domby explores how fabricated narratives about the war’s cause, Reconstruction, and slavery—as expounded at monument dedications and political rallies—were crucial to Jim Crow. He questions the persistent myth of the Confederate army as one of history’s greatest, revealing a convenient disregard of deserters, dissent, and Unionism, and exposes how pension fraud facilitated a myth of unwavering support of the Confederacy among nearly all white Southerners. Domby shows how the dubious concept of "black Confederates" was spun from a small number of elderly and indigent African American North Carolinians who got pensions by presenting themselves as "loyal slaves." The book concludes with a penetrating examination of how the Lost Cause narrative and the lies on which it is based continue to haunt the country today and still work to maintain racial inequality.
Download or read book The Resilience of Southern Identity written by Christopher A. Cooper and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region's politics have shifted from one-party Democratic to the near-domination of the Republican Party, and in-migration has increased its population manyfold. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded--chain restaurants have replaced mom-and-pop diners, and the interstate highway system connects the region to the rest of the country. Given all of these changes, many have argued that southern identity is fading. But here, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts show how these changes have allowed for new types of southern identity to emerge. For some, identification with the South has become more about a connection to the region's folkways or to place than about policy or ideology. For others, the contemporary South is all of those things at once--a place where many modern-day southerners navigate the region's confusing and omnipresent history. Regardless of how individuals see the South, this study argues that the region's drastic political, racial, and cultural changes have not lessened the importance of southern identity but have played a key role in keeping regional identification relevant in the twenty-first century.
