Download or read book Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District written by W. David Lewis and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District contradicts earlier interpretations of southern industrialization by showing that Birmingham, which became a leading symbol of the New South, was in fact deeply rooted in the antebellum plantation system and its "peculiar institution," slavery. As Lewis demonstrates, southern businessmen pursued their own indigenous model of economic growth and were selective in how they imported capital, machinery, and technical expertise from outside the region. The racial crises that erupted in Birmingham during the 1960s can be traced, in part, to labor-intensive developmental strategies that were present from the birth of a city that might have become a bastion of industrial slavery if the South had won the Civil War

Download or read book Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District written by W. David Lewis and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 1994-10-30 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District contradicts earlier interpretations of southern industrialization by showing that Birmingham, which became a leading symbol of the New South, was in fact deeply rooted in the antebellum plantation system and its "peculiar institution", slavery. As Lewis demonstrates, southern businessmen pursued their own indigenous model of economic growth and were selective in how they imported capital, machinery, and technical expertise from outside the region. The racial crises that erupted in Birmingham during the 1960s can be traced, in part, to labor-intensive developmental strategies that were present from the birth of a city that might have become a bastion of industrial slavery if the South had won the Civil War.

Download or read book Sloss Furnaces written by Karen R. Utz and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark is currently the only 20th-century blast furnace in the nation being preserved and interpreted as an industrial museum. Since reopening in 1983, Sloss Furnaces has become an international model for similar preservation efforts and presents a remarkable perspective of the era when America grew to world industrial dominance. At the same time, Sloss is an important reminder of the dreams and struggles of the people who worked in the industries that made Birmingham the "Magic City." Today Sloss is not only dedicated to preservation and education but serves as a center for community and civic events. Site tours and public presentations provide insight into Sloss's industrial heritage as well as a rare glimpse of an early Birmingham that has all but disappeared.

Download or read book Segregation in the New South written by Carl V. Harris and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2022-11-09 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carl V. Harris’s Segregation in the New South, completed and edited by W. Elliot Brownlee, explores the rise of racial exclusion in late nineteenth-century Birmingham, Alabama. In the 1870s, African Americans in this crucial southern industrial city were eager to exploit the disarray of slavery’s old racial lines, assert their new autonomy, and advance toward full equality. However, most southern whites worked to restore the restrictive racial lines of the antebellum South or invent new ones that would guarantee the subordination of Black residents. From Birmingham’s founding in 1871, color lines divided the city, and as its people strove to erase the lines or fortify them, they shaped their futures in fateful ways. Social segregation is at the center of Harris’s history. He shows that from the beginning of Reconstruction southern whites engaged in a comprehensive program of assigning social dishonor to African Americans—the same kind of dishonor that whites of the Old South had imposed on Black people while enslaving them. In the process, southern whites engaged in constructing the meaning of race in the New South.

Download or read book Race Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields 1908 21 written by Brian Kelly and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lucid and supremely readable study, Brian Kelly challenges the prevailing notion that white workers were the main source of resistance to racial equality in the Jim Crow South. Kelly explores the forces that brought the black and white miners of Birmingham, Alabama, together during the hard-fought strikes of 1908 and 1920. He examines the systematic efforts by the region's powerful industrialists to foment racial divisions as a means of splitting the workforce, preventing unionization, and holding wages to the lowest levels in the country. He also details the role played by Birmingham's small but influential black middle class, whose espousal of industrial accommodation outraged black miners and revealed significant tensions within the African-American community.

Download or read book America s Johannesburg written by Bobby M. Wilson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In some ways, no American city symbolizes the black struggle for civil rights more than Birmingham, Alabama. During the 1950s and 1960s, Birmingham gained national and international attention as a center of activity and unrest during the civil rights movement. Racially motivated bombings of the houses of black families who moved into new neighborhoods or who were politically active during this era were so prevalent that Birmingham earned the nickname “Bombingham.” In this critical analysis of why Birmingham became such a national flashpoint, Bobby M. Wilson argues that Alabama’s path to industrialism differed significantly from that of states in the North and Midwest. True to its antebellum roots, no other industrial city in the United States depended as much on the exploitation of black labor so early in its urban development as Birmingham. A persuasive exploration of the links between Alabama’s slaveholding order and the subsequent industrialization of the state, America’s Johannesburg demonstrates that arguments based on classical economics fail to take into account the ways in which racial issues influenced the rise of industrial capitalism.

Download or read book Here I Stand written by Angela Joan Smith and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Beecher (1904-1980) never had the public prominence of his famous ancestors, but as a poet, professor, sociologist, New Deal administrator, journalist, and civil rights activist, he spent his life fighting for the voiceless and oppressed with a distinct moral sensibility that reflected his self-identification as the twentieth-century torchbearer for his famous family. While John Beecher had many vocations in his lifetime, he always considered himself a poet and a teacher. Some critics have compared the populist elements of Beecher's poetry to the work of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, but his writing never gained a broad audience or critical acclaim during his lifetime. This book examines Beecher's writing and activism and places them in the broader context of American culture at pivotal points in the twentieth century.

Download or read book Race and Place in Birmingham written by Bobby M. Wilson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2000 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering book explores the implications of postmodernism for the black community through an analysis of the civil rights and neighborhood movements in Birmingham, Alabama. Grounded not only in class struggle, the Civil Rights Movement was tied to the politics of racial identity, the neighborhood movement to the politics of place identity. Bobby M. Wilson critically examines these two movements, which together transformed race and place in Birmingham. He shows that although the civil rights struggle and neighborhood empowerment served a valuable purpose, they cannot now overcome post-Fordist forces of domination and exclusion. Successful political movements, the author argues, must venture beyond the politics of identity and difference based on race and neighborhood.

Download or read book Mastering Iron written by Anne Kelly Knowles and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world’s dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry. In Mastering Iron, Anne Kelly Knowles argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analysis of a detailed geospatial database that she built of the industry, Knowles reconstructs the American iron industry in unprecedented depth, from locating hundreds of iron companies in their social and environmental contexts to explaining workplace culture and social relations between workers and managers. She demonstrates how ironworks in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia struggled to replicate British technologies but, in the attempt, brought about changes in the American industry that set the stage for the subsequent age of steel. Richly illustrated with dozens of original maps and period art work, all in full color, Mastering Iron sheds new light on American ambitions and highlights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions.

Download or read book The Disfranchisement Myth written by Glenn Feldman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study challenges decades of scholarship on an ever-topical but misunderstood impulse behind disfranchisement in America: racism. Drawing on court documents, voting statistics, civil rights and labor records, and many other sources, Feldman shows that the racist appeals of Alabama's white planters, industrialists, and other conservatives motivated poor whites in far greater numbers and for more-complex reasons than received knowledge concedes. The seemingly natural allies of blacks, poor whites constituted most of the white opposition to disfranchisement, says Feldman. Yet the number of poor whites who backed the new constitution was greater. Ultimately, many would be disfranchised by the very measures they had believed were aimed only at blacks. In that sense, says Feldman, poor whites were "more parties to their own demise than the mere victims of circumstance."

Download or read book The Archaeology of Craft and Industry written by Christopher C. Fennell and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this expansive yet concise survey, Christopher Fennell discusses archaeological research from sites across the United States that once manufactured, harvested, or processed commodities. Through studies of craft enterprise and the Industrial Revolution, this book uncovers key insights into American history from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Exploring evidence from textile mills, glassworks, cutlery manufacturers, and tanneries, Fennell describes the complicated transition from skilled manual work to mechanized production methods, and he offers examples of how artisanal skill remained important in many factory contexts. Fennell also traces the distribution and transportation of goods along canals and railroads. He delves into sites of extraction, such as lumber mills, copper mines, and coal fields, and reviews diverse methods for smelting and shaping iron. The book features an in-depth case study of Edgefield, South Carolina, a town that pioneered the production of alkaline-glazed stoneware pottery. Fennell outlines shifts within the field of industrial archaeology over the past century that have culminated in the recognition that these locations of remarkable energy, tumult, and creativity represent the lives and ingenuity of many people. In addition, he points to ways the field can help inform sustainable strategies for industrial enterprises in the present day.

Download or read book Iron and Steel written by James R. Bennett and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to Birmingham area industrial heritage sites.

Download or read book The Making of Urban America written by Raymond A. Mohl and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors’ extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.

Download or read book Murder on Shades Mountain written by Melanie S. Morrison and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally attacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham's black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jennie Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death. In Murder on Shades Mountain Melanie S. Morrison tells the gripping and tragic story of the attack and its aftermath—events that shook Birmingham to its core. Having first heard the story from her father—who dated Nell's youngest sister when he was a teenager—Morrison scoured the historical archives and documented the black-led campaigns that sought to overturn Peterson's unjust conviction, spearheaded by the NAACP and the Communist Party. The travesty of justice suffered by Peterson reveals how the judicial system could function as a lynch mob in the Jim Crow South. Murder on Shades Mountain also sheds new light on the struggle for justice in Depression-era Birmingham. This riveting narrative is a testament to the courageous predecessors of present-day movements that demand an end to racial profiling, police brutality, and the criminalization of black men.

Download or read book Hugo Black of Alabama written by Steve Suitts and published by NewSouth Books. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three decades after his death, the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black continue to be studied and discussed. This definitive study of Black’s origins and early influences has been 25 years in the making and offers fresh insights into the justice’s character, thought processes, and instincts. Black came out of hardscrabble Alabama hill country, and he never forgot his origins. He was further shaped in the early 20th-century politics of Birmingham, where he set up a law practice and began his political career, eventually rising to the U.S. Senate, from which he was selected by FDR for the high court. Black’s nomination was opposed partly on the grounds that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. One of the book’s conclusions that is sure to be controversial is that in the context of Birmingham in the early 1920s, Black’s joining of the KKK was a progressive act. This startling assertion is supported by an examination of the conflict that was then raging in Birmingham between the Big Mule industrialists and the blue-collar labor unions. Black of course went on to become a staunch judicial advocate of free speech and civil rights, thus making him one of the figures most vilified by the KKK and other white supremacists in the 1950s and 1960s.

Download or read book Democracy in Desperation written by Douglas Steeples and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1998-09-24 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Panic of 1893 and the depression it triggered mark one of the decisive crises in American history. Devastating broad sections of the country like a tidal wave, the depression forced the nation to change its way of life and altered the pattern and pace of national development ever after. The depression served as the setting for the transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society, exposed grave economic and social problems, sharply tested the country's resourcefulness, reshaped popular thought, and changed the direction of foreign policy. It was a crucible in which the elements of the modern United States were clarified and refined. Yet no study to date has examined the depression in its entirety. This is the first book to treat these disparate matters in detail, and to trace and interpret the business contraction of the 1890s in the context of national economic, political, and social development. Steeples and Whitten first explain the origins of the depression, measure its course, and interpret the business recovery, giving full coverage to structural changes in the economy; namely, the growing importance of manufacturing, emergence of new industries, consolidation of business, and increasing importance of finance capitalism. The remainder of the book examines the depression's impact on society—discussing, for example, unemployment, birth rate, health, and education—and on American culture, politics and international relations. Placing the business collapse at the center of the scene, the book shows how the depression was a catalyst for ushering in a more modern America.

Download or read book The Origins of the Southern Middle Class 1800 1861 written by Jonathan Daniel Wells and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-11-16 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a fresh take on social dynamics in the antebellum South, Jonathan Daniel Wells contests the popular idea that the Old South was a region of essentially two classes (planters and slaves) until after the Civil War. He argues that, in fact, the region had a burgeoning white middle class--including merchants, doctors, and teachers--that had a profound impact on southern culture, the debate over slavery, and the coming of the Civil War. Wells shows that the growth of the periodical press after 1820 helped build a cultural bridge between the North and the South, and the emerging southern middle class seized upon northern middle-class ideas about gender roles and reform, politics, and the virtues of modernization. Even as it sought to emulate northern progress, however, the southern middle class never abandoned its attachment to slavery. By the 1850s, Wells argues, the prospect of industrial slavery in the South threatened northern capital and labor, causing sectional relations to shift from cooperative to competitive. Rather than simply pitting a backward, slave-labor, agrarian South against a progressive, free-labor, industrial North, Wells argues that the Civil War reflected a more complex interplay of economic and cultural values.