Download or read book The Role of the Plain Folk in the Southern Antebellum Novel written by Martha Jo Aderholt and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Plain Folk of the Old South written by Frank Lawrence Owsley and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1949, Frank Lawrence Owsley’s Plain Folk of the Old South refuted the popular myth that the antebellum South contained only three classes—planters, poor whites, and slaves. Owsley draws on a wide range of source materials—firsthand accounts such as diaries and the published observations of travelers and journalists; church records; and county records, including wills, deeds, tax lists, and grand-jury reports—to accurately reconstruct the prewar South’s large and significant “yeoman farmer” middle class. He follows the history of this group, beginning with their migration from the Atlantic states into the frontier South, charts their property holdings and economic standing, and tells of the rich texture of their lives: the singing schools and corn shuckings, their courtship rituals and revival meetings, barn raisings and logrollings, and contests of marksmanship and horsemanship such as “snuffing the candle,” “driving the nail,” and the “gander pull.” A new introduction by John B. Boles explains why this book remains the starting point today for the study of society in the Old South.
Download or read book Southern Folk Plain and Fancy written by John Shelton Reed and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1988-07-01 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creating a sort of periodic table of the southern populace, Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy catalogs and describes the several social types--gentleman and lady, "lord of the lash" and cunning belle, fun-loving "good old boy," depraved redneck, and other figures--that have animated the region since antebellum times.
Download or read book Plain Folk s Fight written by Mark V. Wetherington and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an examination of the effects of the Civil War on the rural Southern home front, Mark V. Wetherington looks closely at the experiences of white "plain folk--mostly yeoman farmers and craftspeople--in the wiregrass region of southern Georgia before, during, and after the war. Although previous scholars have argued that common people in the South fought the battles of the region's elites, Wetherington contends that the plain folk in this Georgia region fought for their own self-interest. Plain folk, whose communities were outside areas in which slaves were the majority of the population, feared black emancipation would allow former slaves to move from cotton plantations to subsistence areas like their piney woods communities. Thus, they favored secession, defended their way of life by fighting in the Confederate army, and kept the antebellum patriarchy intact in their home communities. Unable by late 1864 to sustain a two-front war in Virginia and at home, surviving veterans took their fight to the local political arena, where they used paramilitary tactics and ritual violence to defeat freedpeople and their white Republican allies, preserving a white patriarchy that relied on ex-Confederate officers for a new generation of leadership.
Download or read book Plain Folk in a Rich Man s War written by David Williams and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A significant voice in a significant debate . . . full of marvelous quotes."--William W. Freehling, University of Kentucky "Shows clearly that the Solid South was not solid at all [and] demonstrates that the war encompassed much more than military strategy and tactics . . . it was fought at home as well as on the battlefield."--Wayne K. Durrill, University of Cincinnati This compelling and engaging book sheds new light on how planter self-interest, government indifference, and the very nature of southern society produced a rising tide of dissent and disaffection among Georgia's plain folk during the Civil War. The authors make extensive use of local newspapers, court records, manuscript collections, and other firsthand accounts to tell a story of latent class resentment that emerged full force under wartime pressures and undermined southern support for the Confederacy. More directly than any previous historians, the authors make clear the connections between the causes of class resentment and their impact. Planters produced far too much cotton and avoided the draft at will. Speculators hoarded scarce goods and brought on spiraling inflation. Government officials turned a blind eye to the infractions of the rich, and were often bribed to do so. Women left to go hungry took matters into their own hands, stealing livestock in rural areas and rioting for food in every major city in Georgia. The hardships of families back home weighed heavily on soldiers in the field, contributing to rampant desertion. Deserters banded together, sometimes with draft dodgers and blacks escaping enslavement, to defend themselves or to go on the offensive against Confederate authorities. Some whites even planned and participated in slave resistance, a joining of forces that previous historians have long dismissed as highly improbable. So violent did Georgia's inner civil war become that one resident commented, "We are fighting each other harder than we ever fought the enemy." This work stresses more forcefully than any before it that plain folk in the Deep South were far from united behind the Confederate war effort. That lack of unity, brought on largely by class resentment, helped to ensure that the Confederacy's cause would, in the end, be lost. David Williams is professor and acting chair of the Department of History at Valdosta State University.
Download or read book Plain Folk of the Old South written by Frank L. Owsley and published by Crown. This book was released on 1972-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Poor Whites of the Antebellum South written by Charles C. Bolton and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bolton (history, U. of Southern Mississippi) illuminates the social complexity surrounding the lives of a group consistently dismissed as rednecks, crackers, and white trash: landless white tenants and laborers in the era of slavery. A short epilogue looks at their lives today. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Plain Folk of the South Revisited written by Samuel C. Hyde, Jr. and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1997-10-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ?
Download or read book Plain Folk of Color written by David William Dangerfield and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This thesis examines rural free people of color and neighboring white plain folk in the antebellum Charleston District of South Carolina. Utilizing the population census, agricultural census, wills, and other materials, this discussion compares rural free people of color and white plain folk through their experiences in rural society and their economic prospects. In the end, free people of color's many commonalities with their white neighbors break down the distinctions between the two groups and blur the barriers that have separated plain folk and free people of color historiography. While undoubtedly constrained by their race, but economically and socially similar to their non-elite white neighbors, Charleston's rural free people of color merit their own place as plain folk of color."--Page [ii].
Download or read book From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry 1850 1915 written by Stephen A. West and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, Stephen A. West revises understandings of the American South by offering a new perspective on two iconic figures in the region's social landscape. "Yeoman," a term of praise for the small landowning farmer, was commonly used during the antebellum era but ultimately eclipsed by "redneck," an epithet that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. In popular use, each served less as a precise class label than as a means to celebrate or denigrate the moral and civic worth of broad groups of white men. Viewing these richly evocative figures as ideological inventions rather than sociological realities, West examines the divisions they obscured and the conflicts that gave them such force. The setting for this impressively detailed study is the Upper Piedmont of South Carolina, the sort of upcountry region typically associated with the white "plain folk." West shows how the yeoman ideal played a vital role in proslavery discourse before the Civil War but poorly captured the realities of life, with important implications for how historians understand the politics of slavery and the drive for secession. After the Civil War, the South Carolina upcountry was convulsed by the economic transformations and political conflicts out of which the redneck was born. West reinterprets key developments in the history of the New South--such as the politics of lynching and the phenomenon of the "Southern demagogue"--and uncovers the historical roots of a stereotype that continues to loom large in popular understandings of the American South. Drawing together periods and topics often treated separately, West combines economic, social, and political history in an original and compelling account.
Download or read book Wealth and Power in Antebellum Texas written by Randolph B. Campbell and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the level of equality in the distribution of wealth and political power in Texas before the Civil War.
Download or read book Serpent in Eden written by Fred Hobson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The appearance in 1920 of H. L. Mencken's scathing essay about the intellectual and cultural impoverishment of the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart, " set off a firestorm of reaction in the region that continued unabated for much of the next decade. In Serpent in Eden, Mencken scholar Fred Hobson examines Mencken's love-hate relationship with the South. He explores not only Mencken's savage criticism of the region but also his efforts to encourage southern writers and the bold "little magazines, " such as the Reviewer and the Double Dealer, that started up in the South during the 1920s.
Download or read book Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South written by Dickson D. Bruce and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book draws from a variety of sources—literature, politics, folklore, social history—to attempt to set Southern beliefs about violence in a cultural context. According to Dickson D. Bruce, the control of violence was a central concern of antebellum Southerners. Using contemporary sources, Bruce describes Southerners’ attitudes as illustrated in their duels, hunting, and the rhetoric of their politicians. He views antebellum Southerners as pessimistic and deeply distrustful of social relationships and demonstrates how this world view impelled their reliance on formal controls to regularize human interaction. The attitudes toward violence of masters, slaves, and “plain-folk”—the three major social groups of the period—are differentiated, and letters and family papers are used to illustrate how Southern child-rearing practices contributed to attitudes toward violence in the region. The final chapter treats Edgar Allan Poe as a writer who epitomized the attitudes of many Southerners before the Civil War.
Download or read book Cracker Culture written by Grady McWhiney and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History Book Club Alternate Selection. "A controversial and provocative study of the fundamental differences that shaped the South ... fun to read", -- History Book Club Review
Download or read book Plain Folk of the South Revisited written by Samuel C. Hyde, Jr. and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1997-10 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ?
Download or read book Masters of Small Worlds written by Stephanie McCurry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-05-11 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative study of the South Carolina Low Country, author Stephanie McCurry explores the place of the yeomanry in plantation society--the complex web of domestic and public relations within which they were enmeshed, and the contradictory politics of slave society by which that class of small farmers extracted the privileges of masterhood from the region's powerful planters. Insisting on the centrality of women as historical actors and gender as a category of analysis, this work shows how the fateful political choices made by the low-country yeomanry were rooted in the politics of the household, particularly in the customary relations of power male heads of independent households assumed over their dependents, whether slaves or free women and children. Such masterly prerogatives, practiced in the domestic sphere and redeemed in the public, explain the yeomanry's deep commitment to slavery and, ultimately, their ardent embrace of secession. By placing the yeomanry in the center of the drama, McCurry offers a significant reinterpretation of this volatile society on the road to Civil War. Through careful and creative use of a wide variety of archival sources, she brings vividly to life the small worlds of yeoman households, and the larger world of the South Carolina Low Country, the plantation South, and nineteenth-century America.
Download or read book Debating Slavery written by Mark M. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-12-10 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even while slavery existed, Americans debated slavery. Was it a profitable and healthy institution? If so, for whom? The abolition of slavery in 1865 did not end this debate. Similar questions concerning the profitability of slavery, its impact on masters, slaves, and nonslaveowners still inform modern historical debates. Is the slave South best characterized as a capitalist society? Or did its dogged adherence to non-wage labor render it precapitalist? Today, southern slavery is among the most hotly disputed topics in writing on American history. With the use of illustrative material and a critical bibliography, Dr Smith outlines the main contours of this complex debate, summarizes the contending viewpoints, and at the same time weighs up the relative importance, strengths and weaknesses of the various competing interpretations. This book introduces an important topic in American history in a manner which is accessible to students and undergraduates taking courses in American history.
