Download or read book The Rise of Southern Republicans written by Earl BLACK and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation of Southern politics over the past fifty years has been one of the most significant developments in American political life. The emergence of formidable Republican strength in the previously solid Democratic South has generated a novel and highly competitive national battle for control of Congress. Tracing the slow and difficult rise of Republicans in the South over five decades, Earl and Merle Black tell the remarkable story of political upheaval. The Rise of Southern Republicans provides a compelling account of growing competitiveness in Southern party politics and elections. Through extraordinary research and analysis, the authors track Southern voters' shifting economic, cultural, and religious loyalties, black/white conflicts and interests during and after federal civil rights intervention, and the struggles and adaptations of congressional candidates and officials. A newly competitive South, the authors argue, means a newly competitive and revitalized America. The story of how the South became a two-party region is ultimately the story of two-party politics in America at the end of the twentieth century. Earl and Merle Black have written a bible for anyone who wants to understand regional and national congressional politics over the past half-century. Because the South is now at the epicenter of Republican and Democratic strategies to control Congress, The Rise of Southern Republicans is essential to understanding the dynamics of current American politics. Table of Contents: 1. The Southern Transformation 2. Confronting the Democratic Juggernaut 3. The Promising Peripheral South 4. The Impenetrable Deep South 5. The Democratic Smother 6. The Democratic Domination 7. Reagan's Realignment of White Southerners 8. A New Party System in the South 9. The Peripheral South Breakthrough 10. The Deep South Challenge 11. The Republican Surge 12. Competitive South, Competitive America Notes Index Reviews of this book: These two leading scholars of Southern politics present a rigorous investigation of how voting in the peripheral South (Florida, Arkansas, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee) and the Deep South (Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina) was realigned since Ronald Reagan was first elected president in 1980. --Karl Helicher, Library Journal With publication of their latest book, The Rise of Southern Republicans the Blacks, both 60, have produced a trilogy that traces an almost geologic-style evolution in the South's political landscape. They've analyzed the whys and what-fors of a region, that in the past 50 years, has gone from impenetrably Democratic to competitively Republican. Their overarching conclusion: the two-party warfare that defines the South defines the nation...The Blacks' work--a mix of political wonkery and historical perspective, cut with the deliciously illuminating anecdote--is read by academics in various disciplines and political junkies of all stripes. The books are valued for their coolly dissecting insights...Because their writing swells beyond the data-crunching lab work of most political scientists--though new readers beware: The books are littered with scary-looking charts and graphs--it travels beyond academia. Party strategists are steeped in the work. "The Blacks wrote the book on how academic political science can illuminate practical politics," says Republican pollster Whit Ayers. --Drew Jubera, Atlanta Journal-Constitution The South's political identity has been transformed in the last half-century from a region of Democratic hegemony to a region of Republican majority. Earl and Merle Black...sedulously examine this remarkable change...This is a work of serious scholarship that lacks any hint of a partisan purpose. Committed readers will increase their understanding of both Southern and national politics. The Blacks' effort may well be the definitive statement on Southern politics over the 20th century. --Publishers Weekly Not since 1872, Earl Black and Merle Black point out in their third book on Southern politics, had the Republicans constructed majorities from both the North and the South in both houses, and it was the national character of their victory that made the 1994 election such a landmark...In The Rise of Southern Republicans, the Black brothers chronicle the party's history from the 1930s to the present, election by election. They illuminate the economic, racial and political dynamics that gradually moved the South toward the Republican Party, while also warning that the Republicans do not by any means own the region in the way the Democrats once did. --Kevin Sack, New York Times Book Review In The Rise of Southern Republicans brothers Earl and Merle Black explain the partisan realignment that has brought the South into the national political mainstream. The Blacks...focus most of their attention on the congressional arena, where voting patterns reflect long-term partisan loyalty more closely than at the presidential level...[T]he story the authors of The Rise of Southern Republicans tell is a fascinating one, with implications for American politics that are both profound and uncertain. --David Lowe, Weekly Standard The rise of southern Republicans is one of the most consequential stories in modern American politics. For political reporters of a certain generation...the Democratic dominance of Southern congressional politics is barely understood. The Black brothers make it all very clear. --Major Garrett, Washington Monthly This superb analysis of Southern politics by Earl Black...and his brother Merle Black...not only tracks the recent rise of Republicans in the South but explains why party realignment along ideological lines was so long in coming to that region...The Rise of Southern Republicans is already being rightly hailed as a political science classic. Its strength is the thorough and systematic manner in which it examines the changing ways a wide variety of factors have affected Southern voting patterns over the past four decades. The data and the rigor of the analysis are truly impressive. --James D. Fairbanks, Houston Chronicle This extraordinary book by the country's two leading scholarly experts on the politics of the American South could accurately have been titled "Everything you wanted to know about Southern politics, as well as everything you could ever imagine asking about it"...Their knowledge of the intricacies of particular congressional districts across the region is amazing, and their analysis of the larger partisan trends in the region makes this the most important book on Southern politics. --Stephen J. Farnsworth, Richmond Times-Dispatch The Black brothers have done it again. The Rise of Southern Republicans is without question the most important book ever written on the role of the South in Congress and the partisan consequences for our national legislature. Far and away the most comprehensive updating of the V.O. Key classic Southern Politics. This is a major work by extremely talented scholars. --Charles S. Bullock, University of Georgia The dramatic rise of the Republican Party in the South is the single most important factor in the transformation of American politics since the 1960s. Earl and Merle Black have described this process in a book that is witty, always filled with insight, and readable to the last page. The Rise of Southern Republicans is indispensable reading for anyone interested in American politics - past, present or future. --Dan T. Carter, author of The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics This marvelous book captures - with authority and readability - the big story of post-New Deal party politics in the United States. It is a surefire classic of political science and politics. --Richard F. Fenno, Jr., author of Congress at the Grassroots: Representational Change in the South, 1970-1998

Download or read book Republican Party Politics and the American South 1865 1968 written by Boris Heersink and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces how the Republican Party in the South after Reconstruction transformed from a biracial organization to a mostly all-white one.

Download or read book Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South written by Steven P. Miller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While spreading the gospel around the world through his signature crusades, internationally renowned evangelist Billy Graham maintained a visible and controversial presence in his native South, a region that underwent substantial political and economic change in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this period Graham was alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, Sunbelt booster in Atlanta, regional apologist in the national press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration. Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South considers the critical but underappreciated role of the noted evangelist in the creation of the modern American South. The region experienced two significant related shifts away from its status as what observers and critics called the "Solid South": the end of legalized Jim Crow and the end of Democratic Party dominance. Author Steven P. Miller treats Graham as a serious actor and a powerful symbol in this transition—an evangelist first and foremost, but also a profoundly political figure. In his roles as the nation's most visible evangelist, adviser to political leaders, and a regional spokesperson, Graham influenced many of the developments that drove celebrants and detractors alike to place the South at the vanguard of political, religious, and cultural trends. He forged a path on which white southern moderates could retreat from Jim Crow, while his evangelical critique of white supremacy portended the emergence of "color blind" rhetoric within mainstream conservatism. Through his involvement in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, as well as his deep social ties in the South, the evangelist influenced the decades-long process of political realignment. Graham's public life sheds new light on recent southern history in all of its ambiguities, and his social and political ethics complicate conventional understandings of evangelical Christianity in postwar America. Miller's book seeks to reintroduce a familiar figure to the narrative of southern history and, in the process, examine the political and social transitions constitutive of the modern South.

Download or read book The Republican South written by David Lublin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive and in-depth look at southern politics in the United States challenges conventional notions about the rise of the Republican Party in the South. David Lublin argues that the evolution of southern politics must be seen as part of a process of democratization of the region's politics. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided a sharp jolt forward in this process by greatly expanding the southern electorate. Nevertheless, Democrats prevented Republicans from capitalizing rapidly on these changes. The overwhelming dominance of the region's politics by Democrats and their frequent adoption of conservative positions made it difficult for the GOP to attract either candidates or voters in many contests. However, electoral rules and issues gradually propelled the Democrats to the Left and more conservative white voters and politicians into the arms of the Republican Party. Surprisingly, despite the racial turmoil of the civil rights era, economic rather than racial issues first separated Democrats from Republicans. Only later did racial and social issues begin to rival economic questions as a source of partisan division and opportunity for Republican politicians.

Download or read book The Emerging Republican Majority written by Kevin P. Phillips and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-23 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most important and controversial books in modern American politics, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) explained how Richard Nixon won the White House in 1968—and why the Republicans would go on to dominate presidential politics for the next quarter century. Rightly or wrongly, the book has widely been seen as a blueprint for how Republicans, using the so-called Southern Strategy, could build a durable winning coalition in presidential elections. Certainly, Nixon's election marked the end of a "New Deal Democratic hegemony" and the beginning of a conservative realignment encompassing historically Democratic voters from the South and the Florida-to-California "Sun Belt," in the book’s enduring coinage. In accounting for that shift, Kevin Phillips showed how two decades and more of social and political changes had created enormous opportunities for a resurgent conservative Republican Party. For this new edition, Phillips has written a preface describing his view of the book, its reception, and how its analysis was borne out in subsequent elections. A work whose legacy and influence are still fiercely debated, The Emerging Republican Majority is essential reading for anyone interested in American politics or history.

Download or read book How the South Won the Civil War written by Heather Cox Richardson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.

Download or read book The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South 1932 1968 written by Kari Frederickson and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-01-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1948, a group of conservative white southerners formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, soon nicknamed the "Dixiecrats," and chose Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate. Thrown on the defensive by federal civil rights initiatives and unprecedented grassroots political activity by African Americans, the Dixiecrats aimed to reclaim conservatives' former preeminent position within the national Democratic Party and upset President Harry Truman's bid for reelection. The Dixiecrats lost the battle in 1948, but, as Kari Frederickson reveals, the political repercussions of their revolt were significant. Frederickson situates the Dixiecrat movement within the tumultuous social and economic milieu of the 1930s and 1940s South, tracing the struggles between conservative and liberal Democrats over the future direction of the region. Enriching her sweeping political narrative with detailed coverage of local activity in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina--the flashpoints of the Dixiecrat campaign--she shows that, even without upsetting Truman in 1948, the Dixiecrats forever altered politics in the South. By severing the traditional southern allegiance to the national Democratic Party in presidential elections, the Dixiecrats helped forge the way for the rise of the Republican Party in the region.

Download or read book The Long Southern Strategy written by Angie Maxwell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Long Southern Strategy, Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields trace the consequences of the GOP's decision to court white voters in the South. Over time, Republicans adopted racially coded, anti-feminist, and evangelical Christian rhetoric and policies, making its platform more southern and more partisan, and the remodel paid off. This strategy has helped the party reach new voters and secure electoral victories, up to and including the 2016 election. Now, in any Republican primary, the most southern-presenting candidate wins, regardless of whether that identity is real or performed. Using an original and wide-ranging data set of voter opinions, Maxwell and Shields examine what southerners believe and show how Republicans such as Donald Trump stoke support in the South and among southern-identified voters across the nation.

Download or read book To Make Men Free written by Heather Cox Richardson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of Democracy Awakening, “the most comprehensive account of the GOP and its competing impulses” (Los Angeles Times) When Abraham Lincoln helped create the Republican Party on the eve of the Civil War, his goal was to promote economic opportunity for all Americans, not just the slaveholding Southern planters who steered national politics. Yet, despite the egalitarian dream at the heart of its founding, the Republican Party quickly became mired in a fundamental identity crisis. Would it be the party of democratic ideals? Or would it be the party of moneyed interests? In the century and a half since, Republicans have vacillated between these two poles, with dire economic, political, and moral repercussions for the entire nation. In To Make Men Free, celebrated historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the shifting ideology of the Grand Old Party from the antebellum era to the Great Recession, revealing the insidious cycle of boom and bust that has characterized the Party since its inception. While in office, progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower revived Lincoln's vision of economic freedom and expanded the government, attacking the concentration of wealth and nurturing upward mobility. But they and others like them have been continually thwarted by powerful business interests in the Party. Their opponents appealed to Americans' latent racism and xenophobia to regain political power, linking taxation and regulation to redistribution and socialism. The results of the Party's wholesale embrace of big business are all too familiar: financial collapses like the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression in 1929, and the Great Recession in 2008. With each passing decade, with each missed opportunity and political misstep, the schism within the Republican Party has grown wider, pulling the GOP ever further from its founding principles. Expansive and authoritative, To Make Men Free is a sweeping history of the Party that was once America's greatest political hope -- and, time and time again, has proved its greatest disappointment.

Download or read book Conceiving a New Republic written by Charles William Calhoun and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He also examines their struggle to revive the experiment with the Lodge Federal Elections bill of 1890 - the last serious attempt at civil rights legislation until the 1950s.".

Download or read book The Transformation of Southern Politics written by Jack Bass and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stressing the relevance of The Transformation of Southern Politics as a background for understanding the South into the next century, Jack Bass and Walter De Vries write that the "themes of change in southern politics still involve the rise of the Republican Party, black political development and the Democratic response to it--and the interaction of these forces with social and economic issues." The Transformation of Southern Politics examines the post-World War II political evolution of the eleven southern states and traces the effects of such influences as Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, urban migration, the growth of the Republican Party, and the rise of African Americans in the political landscape. Relying on the methodology that V. O. Key used in his 1949 classic Southern Politics in State and Nation, the work draws on interviews with more than 360 politicians, scholars, journalists, and labor leaders, and includes a wealth of data on voting trends, political perceptions, and population flow to present a comprehensive portrait of the region up to the 1976 presidential election. In the preface to the Brown Thrasher edition, Bass and De Vries offer an overview of the region's current political climate, including an analysis of the 1994 mid-term elections. They also provide excerpts from their interview with Bill Clinton during his first campaign for political office.

Download or read book The New Politics of the Old South written by Charles S. Bullock and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest presidential election demonstrated the national importance of the shifting demographics and partisan leanings of the Southern states. When it first appeared in 1998, The New Politics of the Old South broke new ground by examining Southern political trends at the end of the twentieth century. Now in its fourth edition, with all chapters extensively revised and updated to cover events up through the 2008 elections, the authors continue their unique state-by-state analysis of political behavior. Written by the country's leading scholars of Southern politics and designed to be adopted for courses on Southern politics (but accessible to any interested reader), this book traces the shifting trends of the Southern electorate and explains its growing influence on the course of national politics.

Download or read book The Southern Strategy Revisited written by Joseph A. Aistrup and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1994 elections represented a watershed year for southern Republicans. For the first time since Reconstruction, they gained control of a majority of national seats and governorships. Yet, despite these impressive gains, southern Republicans control only three of twenty-two state legislative chambers and 37 percent of state legislative seats. Joseph A. Aistrup addresses why this divergence between the national and subnational levels persists even after GOP national landslides in 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1994. Explanations for this divergence lie in the interaction between the Republicans' "Southern Strategy" -a set of coherent ideological tactics designed to lure southern whites to support GOP candidates-and the Republicans' top-down party development efforts. Aistrup analyzes the historical evolution of the Republican Southern Strategy from Goldwater in 1961 to the "Contract with America" in 1994. Examining the roles of ideology, intra party politics, gerrymandering, and Democratic incumbency in Republican top-down advancement, he predicts the extent to which these will remain significant obstacles to GOP success in subnational elections after 1994. Aistrup reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the Southern Strategy as it relates to candidate ideology and examines the influences of Republican victories in national and statewide offices on the party's subnational advancement. He shows a clear connection between Republican presidential success and southern Republican advancement in local elections.

Download or read book Grand Old Party written by Lewis L. Gould and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly readable narrative history of the Republican Party profiles the G.O.P. from its emergence as an antislavery party during the 1850s to its current place as champion of political conservatism.

Download or read book Republican Ascendancy in Southern U S House Elections written by Seth C. McKee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tremendous transformation marks the last three decades of American politics, and nowhere has this change been as distinctive and penetrating as in the American South. After 120 consecutive years of minority status, the rapid ascendancy of Southern House Republicans in the 1990s has reshaped the contours of contemporary American politics: increasing party polarization, making a Republican House majority possible, and, most recently, contributing to the revival of Democratic fortunes in national congressional elections. Southern Republican ascendancy constitutes an exemplar of party system change, made possible by three sequential factors: increasing Republican identification, redistricting, and the emergence of viable Republican candidates. Relying on existing and original data sources, this text presents the most recent example of large-scale partisan change. Beyond serving as a primer for the study of political parties, campaigns and elections, and Southern politics, Republican Ascendancy in Southern U.S. House Elections provides an original theoretical argument and an expansive view of why political change in the South has such strong implications for national politics.

Download or read book South Park Conservatives written by Brian C. Anderson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the better part of 30 years, liberal bias has dominated mainstream media. But author and political journalist Brian Anderson reveals in his new book that the era of liberal dominance is going the way of the dodo bird.

Download or read book The End of Southern Exceptionalism written by Byron E. Shafer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation of Southern politics after World War II changed the political life not just of this distinctive region, but of the entire nation. Until now, the critical shift in Southern political allegiance from Democratic to Republican has been explained, by scholars and journalists, as a white backlash to the civil rights revolution. In this myth-shattering book, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston refute that view, one stretching all the way back to V. O. Key in his classic book Southern Politics. The true story is instead one of dramatic class reversal, beginning in the 1950s and pulling everything else in its wake. Where once the poor voted Republican and the rich Democrat, that pattern reversed, as economic development became the engine of Republican gains. Racial desegregation, never far from the heart of the story, often applied the brakes to these gains rather than fueling them. A book that is bound to shake up the study of Southern politics, this will also become required reading for pundits and political strategists, for all those who argue over what it takes to carry the South.