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.

Download or read book The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century written by Jonathan Daniel Wells and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-12-12 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green provide a series of provocative essays reflecting innovative, original research on professional and commercial interests in the nineteenth-century South, a place often seen as being composed of just two classes -- planters and slaves. Rather, an active middle class, made up of men and women devoted to the cultural and economic modernization of Dixie, worked with each other -- and occasionally their northern counterparts -- to bring reforms to the region. With a balance of established and younger authors, of antebellum and postbellum analyses, and of narrative and quantitative methodologies, these essays offer new ways to think about politics, society, gender, and culture during this exciting era of southern history. The contributors show that many like-minded southerners sought to create a "New South" with a society similar to that of the North. They supported the creation of public schools and an end to dueling, but less progressive reform was also endorsed, such as building factories using slave labor rather than white wage earners. The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century significantly influences thought on the social structure of the South, the centrality of class in history, and the events prior to and after the Civil War.

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 2004 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861

Download or read book The Origins of the Southern Middle Class written by Jonathan Daniel Wells and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 858 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century written by Jonathan Daniel Wells and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-12-12 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green provide a series of provocative essays reflecting innovative, original research on professional and commercial interests in the nineteenth-century South, a place often seen as being composed of just two classes -- planters and slaves. Rather, an active middle class, made up of men and women devoted to the cultural and economic modernization of Dixie, worked with each other -- and occasionally their northern counterparts -- to bring reforms to the region. With a balance of established and younger authors, of antebellum and postbellum analyses, and of narrative and quantitative methodologies, these essays offer new ways to think about politics, society, gender, and culture during this exciting era of southern history. The contributors show that many like-minded southerners sought to create a "New South" with a society similar to that of the North. They supported the creation of public schools and an end to dueling, but less progressive reform was also endorsed, such as building factories using slave labor rather than white wage earners. The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century significantly influences thought on the social structure of the South, the centrality of class in history, and the events prior to and after the Civil War.

Download or read book The Kidnapping Club written by Jonathan Daniel Wells and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of a 2020-2021 New York City Book Award In a rapidly changing New York, two forces battled for the city's soul: the pro-slavery New Yorkers who kept the illegal slave trade alive and well, and the abolitionists fighting for freedom. We often think of slavery as a southern phenomenon, far removed from the booming cities of the North. But even though slavery had been outlawed in Gotham by the 1830s, Black New Yorkers were not safe. Not only was the city built on the backs of slaves; it was essential in keeping slavery and the slave trade alive. In The Kidnapping Club, historian Jonathan Daniel Wells tells the story of the powerful network of judges, lawyers, and police officers who circumvented anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free and fugitive African Americans. Nicknamed "The New York Kidnapping Club," the group had the tacit support of institutions from Wall Street to Tammany Hall whose wealth depended on the Southern slave and cotton trade. But a small cohort of abolitionists, including Black journalist David Ruggles, organized tirelessly for the rights of Black New Yorkers, often risking their lives in the process. Taking readers into the bustling streets and ports of America's great Northern metropolis, The Kidnapping Club is a dramatic account of the ties between slavery and capitalism, the deeply corrupt roots of policing, and the strength of Black activism.

Download or read book Money Over Mastery Family Over Freedom written by Calvin Schermerhorn and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Contents -- Series Editor's Foreword -- Prologue -- 1 Networkers -- 2 Watermen -- 3 Domestics -- 4 Makers -- 5 Railroaders -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Essay on Sources -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W

Download or read book The Old South s Modern Worlds written by L. Diane Barnes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-06 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Old South has traditionally been portrayed as an insular and backward-looking society. The Old South's Modern Worlds looks beyond this myth to identify some of the many ways that antebellum southerners were enmeshed in the modernizing trends of their time. The essays gathered in this volume not only tell unexpected narratives of the Old South, they also explore the compatibility of slavery-the defining feature of antebellum southern life-with cultural and material markers of modernity such as moral reform, cities, and industry. Considered as proponents of American manifest destiny, for example, antebellum southern politicians look more like nationalists and less like separatists. Though situated within distinct communities, Southerners'-white, black, and red-participated in and responded to movements global in scope and transformative in effect. The turmoil that changes in Asian and European agriculture wrought among southern staple producers shows the interconnections between seemingly isolated southern farms and markets in distant lands. Deprovincializing the antebellum South, The Old South's Modern Worlds illuminates a diverse region both shaped by and contributing to the complex transformations of the nineteenth-century world.

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 2008 with total page 332 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 The Impending Crisis of the South written by Hinton Rowan Helper and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-04-29 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint of the original, first published in 1859. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Download or read book Confederate Cities written by Andrew L. Slap and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we talk about the Civil War, we often describe it in terms of battles that took place in small towns or in the countryside: Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and, most tellingly, the Battle of the Wilderness. One reason this picture has persisted is that few urban historians have studied the war, even though cities hosted, enabled, and shaped Southern society as much as they did in the North. Confederate Cities, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, shifts the focus from the agrarian economy that undergirded the South to the cities that served as its political and administrative hubs. The contributors use the lens of the city to examine now-familiar Civil War–era themes, including the scope of the war, secession, gender, emancipation, and war’s destruction. This more integrative approach dramatically revises our understanding of slavery’s relationship to capitalist economics and cultural modernity. By enabling a more holistic reading of the South, the book speaks to contemporary Civil War scholars and students alike—not least in providing fresh perspectives on a well-studied war.

Download or read book Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South written by Michael S. Frawley and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-05-08 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the Civil War, contemporary narratives about the American South pointed to the perceived lack of industrial development in the region to explain why the Confederacy succumbed to the Union. Even after the cliometric revolution of the 1970s, when historians first began applying statistical analysis to reexamine antebellum manufacturing output, the pervasive belief in the region’s backward-ness prompted many scholars to view slavery, not industry, as the economic engine of the South. In Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South, historian Michael S. Frawley engages a wide variety of sources—including United States census data, which many historians have underutilized when gauging economic growth in the prewar South—to show how industrial development in the region has been systematically minimized by scholars. In doing so, Frawley reconsiders factors related to industrial production in the prewar South, such as the availability of natural resources, transportation, markets, labor, and capital. He contends that the Gulf South was far more industrialized and modern than suggested by census records, economic historians like Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, and contemporary travel writers such as Frederick Law Olmsted. Frawley situates the prewar South firmly in a varied and widespread industrial context, contesting the assumption that slavery inhibited industry in the region and that this lack of economic diversity ultimately prevented the Confederacy from waging a successful war. Though southern manufacturing firms could not match the output of northern states, Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South proves that such entities had established themselves as vital forces in the southern economy on the eve of the Civil War.

Download or read book Beyond Freedom s Reach written by Adam Rothman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-25 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born into slavery in rural Louisiana, Rose Herera was bought and sold several times before being purchased by the De Hart family of New Orleans. Still a slave, she married and had children, who also became the property of the De Harts. But after Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862 during the American Civil War, Herera’s owners fled to Havana, taking three of her small children with them. Beyond Freedom’s Reach is the true story of one woman’s quest to rescue her children from bondage. In a gripping, meticulously researched account, Adam Rothman lays bare the mayhem of emancipation during and after the Civil War. Just how far the rights of freed slaves extended was unclear to black and white people alike, and so when Mary De Hart returned to New Orleans in 1865 to visit friends, she was surprised to find herself taken into custody as a kidnapper. The case of Rose Herera’s abducted children made its way through New Orleans’ courts, igniting a custody battle that revealed the prospects and limits of justice during Reconstruction. Rose Herera’s perseverance brought her children’s plight to the attention of members of the U.S. Senate and State Department, who turned a domestic conflict into an international scandal. Beyond Freedom’s Reach is an unforgettable human drama and a poignant reflection on the tangled politics of slavery and the hazards faced by so many Americans on the hard road to freedom.

Download or read book The Global Bourgeoisie written by Christof Dejung and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first global history of the middle class While the nineteenth century has been described as the golden age of the European bourgeoisie, the emergence of the middle class and bourgeois culture was by no means exclusive to Europe. The Global Bourgeoisie explores the rise of the middle classes around the world during the age of empire. Bringing together eminent scholars, this landmark essay collection compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods. The contributors indicate that the middle class was from its very beginning, even in Europe, the result of international connections and entanglements. Essays are grouped into six thematic sections: the political history of middle-class formation, the impact of imperial rule on the colonial middle class, the role of capitalism, the influence of religion, the obstacles to the middle class beyond the Western and colonial world, and, lastly, reflections on the creation of bourgeois cultures and global social history. Placing the establishment of middle-class society into historical context, this book shows how the triumph or destabilization of bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order. The Global Bourgeoisie irrevocably changes the understanding of how an important social class came to be.

Download or read book Freedom in a Slave Society written by Johanna Nicol Shields and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-13 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the Civil War, most Southern white people were as strongly committed to freedom for their kind as to slavery for African Americans. This study views that tragic reality through the lens of eight authors - representatives of a South that seemed, to them, destined for greatness but was, we know, on the brink of destruction. Exceptionally able and ambitious, these men and women won repute among the educated middle classes in the Southwest, South and the nation, even amid sectional tensions. Although they sometimes described liberty in the abstract, more often these authors discussed its practical significance: what it meant for people to make life's important choices freely and to be responsible for the results. They publicly insisted that freedom caused progress, but hidden doubts clouded this optimistic vision. Ultimately, their association with the oppression of slavery dimmed their hopes for human improvement, and fear distorted their responses to the sectional crisis.

Download or read book Hood s Texas Brigade written by Susannah J. Ural and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most effective units to fight on either side of the Civil War, the Texas Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia served under Robert E. Lee from the Seven Days Battles in 1862 to the surrender at Appomattox in 1865. In Hood’s Texas Brigade, Susannah J. Ural presents a nontraditional unit history that traces the experiences of these soldiers and their families to gauge the war’s effect on them and to understand their role in the white South’s struggle for independence. According to Ural, several factors contributed to the Texas Brigade’s extraordinary success: the unit’s strong self-identity as Confederates; the mutual respect among the junior officers and their men; a constant desire to maintain their reputation not just as Texans but as the top soldiers in Robert E. Lee’s army; and the fact that their families matched the men’s determination to fight and win. Using the letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper accounts, official reports, and military records of nearly 600 brigade members, Ural argues that the average Texas Brigade volunteer possessed an unusually strong devotion to southern independence: whereas most Texans and Arkansans fought in the West or Trans- Mississippi West, members of the Texas Brigade volunteered for a unit that moved them over a thousand miles from home, believing that they would exert the greatest influence on the war’s outcome by fighting near the Confederate capital in Richmond. These volunteers also took pride in their place in, or connections to, the slave-holding class that they hoped would secure their financial futures. While Confederate ranks declined from desertion and fractured morale in the last years of the war, this belief in a better life—albeit one built through slave labor— kept the Texas Brigade more intact than other units. Hood’s Texas Brigade challenges key historical arguments about soldier motivation, volunteerism and desertion, home-front morale, and veterans’ postwar adjustment. It provides an intimate picture of one of the war’s most effective brigades and sheds new light on the rationales that kept Confederate soldiers fighting throughout the most deadly conflict in U.S. history.

Download or read book Blind No More written by Jonathan Daniel Wells and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a fresh interpretation of African American resistance to kidnapping and pre-Civil War political culture, Blind No More sheds new light on the coming of the Civil War by focusing on a neglected truism: the antebellum free states experienced a dramatic ideological shift that questioned the value of the Union. Jonathan Daniel Wells explores the cause of disunion as the persistent determination on the part of enslaved people that they would flee bondage no matter the risks. By protesting against kidnappings and fugitive slave renditions, they brought slavery to the doorstep of the free states, forcing those states to recognize the meaning of freedom and the meaning of states' rights in the face of a federal government equally determined to keep standing its divided house. Through these actions, African Americans helped northerners and westerners question whether the constitutional compact was still worth upholding, a reevaluation of the republican experiment that would ultimately lead not just to Civil War but to the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery. Wells contends that the real story of American freedom lay not with the Confederate rebels nor even with the Union army but instead rests with the tens of thousands of self-emancipated men and women who demonstrated to the Founders, and to succeeding generations of Americans, the value of liberty.