Download or read book Old South New South written by Gavin Wright and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative and intricate analysis of the postbellum southern economy, Gavin Wright finds in the South’s peculiar labor market the answer to the perennial question of why the region remained backward for so long. After the Civil War, Wright explains, the South continued to be a low-wage regional market embedded in a high-wage national economy. He vividly details the origins, workings, and ultimate demise of that distinct system. The post-World War II southern economy, which created today’s Sunbelt, Wright shows, is not the result of the evolution of the old system, but the product of a revolution brought on by the New Deal and World War II that shattered the South’s stagnant structure and created a genuinely new, thriving order.
Download or read book Modernizing a Slave Economy written by John Majewski and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? In fact, this was something that southern secessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the Confederacy. The traditional view assumes that Confederate slave-based agrarianism went hand in hand with a natural hostility toward industry and commerce. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, John Majewski's analysis finds that secessionists strongly believed in industrial development and state-led modernization. They blamed the South's lack of development on Union policies of discriminatory taxes on southern commerce and unfair subsidies for northern industry. Majewski argues that Confederates' opposition to a strong central government was politically tied to their struggle against northern legislative dominance. Once the Confederacy was formed, those who had advocated states' rights in the national legislature in order to defend against northern political dominance quickly came to support centralized power and a strong executive for war making and nation building.
Download or read book Slavery and the Southern Economy written by Harold D. Woodman and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Slavery and American Economic Development written by Gavin Wright and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-10-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Slavery and American Economic Development is a small book with a big interpretative punch. It is one of those rare books about a familiar subject that manages to seem fresh and new." -- Charles B. Dew, Journal of Interdisciplinary History "A stunning reinterpretation of southern economic history and what is perhaps the most important book in the field since Time on the Cross.... I frequently found myself forced to rethink long-held positions." -- Russell R. Menard, Civil War History Through an analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents an innovative look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. He draws a distinction between slavery as a form of work organization -- the aspect that has dominated historical debates -- and slavery as a set of property rights. Slave-based commerce remained central to the eighteenth-century rise of the Atlantic economy, not because slave plantations were superior as a method of organizing production, but because slaves could be put to work on sugar plantations that could not have attracted free labor on economically viable terms. Gavin Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor in American Economic History at Stanford University and the author of The Political Economy of the Cotton South and Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War, winner of the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award of the Southern Historical Association. He has served as president of the Economic History Association and the Agricultural History Society.
Download or read book Old South new South written by Gavin Wright and published by New York : Basic Books. This book was released on 1986-05-13 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original and economically rigorous analysis of the role of slavery in generating economic "backwardness." Wright traces key reasons for the South's century-long status as a second-class country-within-a-country, and assesses the legacy of slavery, the material devastation and social upheaval of the Civil War, and the colonial exploitation of the South by northern capital. He maintains that above all the defining feature of the southern economy was the isolation of its labor market from national and international development. On this basis, Wright explains the sharecropping system, the Populist revolt, the South's limited investment in the education of its own people, and the low-skill, low-productivity, "colonial" character of the region's industrial progress. Only the intervention of the Federal Government during the Great Depression, the author argues, destroyed the bases of the South's low-wage economy, led to long-delayed mechanization of the plantation, helped close the North-South wage gap, and created massive out-migration of unskilled labor during and after World War II. With the demise of the plantation regime, the South opened its doors to outside flows of capital and labor.
Download or read book The Long Twentieth Century written by Giovanni Arrighi and published by Verso. This book was released on 1994 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the American Sociological Association PEWS Award (1995) for Distinguished Scholarship The Long Twentieth Century traces the epochal shifts in the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Giovanni Arrighi masterfully synthesizes social theory, comparative history and historical narrative in this account of the structures and agencies which have shaped the course of world history over the millennium. Borrowing from Braudel, Arrighi argues that the history of capitalism has unfolded as a succession of "long centuries"—ages during which a hegemonic power deploying a novel combination of economic and political networks secured control over an expanding world-economic space. The modest beginnings, rise and violent unravel-ing of the links forged between capital, state power, and geopolitics by hegemonic classes and states are explored with dramatic intensity. From this perspective, Arrighi explains the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English, and finally American capitalism. The book concludes with an examination of the forces which have shaped and are now poised to undermine America's world power.
Download or read book Southern Society and Its Transformations 1790 1860 written by Susanna Delfino and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2011-07-29 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Southern Society and Its Transformations, a new set of scholars challenge conventional perceptions of the antebellum South as an economically static region compared to the North. Showing that the pre-Civil War South was much more complex than once thought, the essays in this volume examine the economic lives and social realities of three overlooked but important groups of southerners: the working poor, non-slaveholding whites, and middling property holders such as small planters, professionals, and entrepreneurs. The nine essays that comprise Southern Society and Its Transformations explore new territory in the study of the slave-era South, conveying how modernization took shape across the region and exploring the social processes involved in its economic developments. The book is divided into four parts, each analyzing a different facet of white southern life. The first outlines the legal dimensions of race relations, exploring the effects of lynching and the significance of Georgia’s vagrancy laws. Part II presents the advent of the market economy and its effect on agriculture in the South, including the beginning of frontier capitalism. The third section details the rise of a professional middle class in the slave era and the conflicts provoked. The book’s last section deals with the financial aspects of the transformation in the South, including the credit and debt relationships at play and the presence of corporate entrepreneurship. Between the dawn of the nation and the Civil War, constant change was afoot in the American South. Scholarship has only begun to explore these progressions in the past few decades and has given too little consideration to the economic developments with respect to the working-class experience. These essays show that a new generation of scholars is asking fresh questions about the social aspects of the South’s economic transformation. Southern Society and Its Transformations is a complex look at how whole groups of traditionally ignored white southerners in the slave era embraced modernizing economic ideas and actions while accepting a place in their race-based world. This volume will be of interest to students of Southern and U.S. economic and social history.
Download or read book Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy written by University of Texas at Arlington and published by College Station [Tex.] : Published for the University of Texas at Arlington by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fledgling system of capitalist agriculture transformed former slaves into wage workers and former masters into employers, yet neither group could comfortably fit into its new role. Armstead L. Robinson discusses black freedom in the postbellum South and the new set of social relationships that emerged, while Thavolia Glymph traces the evolution of the share-wage system into sharecropping. Barbara J. Fields explores the erratic advance of capitalism in the New South and its effects on the southern economy. Harold D. Woodman concludes that emancipation alone could not guarantee the triumph of a completely new social order on post-war cotton plantations.
Download or read book Technology Innovation and Southern Industrialization written by Susanna Delfino and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because of its strong agrarian roots, the South has typically been viewed as a region not favorably disposed to innovation and technology. Yet innovation was never absent from industrialization in this part of the United States. From the early nineteenth century onward, southerners were as eager as other Americans to embrace technology as a path to modernity. This volume features seven essays that range widely across the region and its history, from the antebellum era to the present, to assess the role of innovations presumed lacking by most historians. Offering a challenging interpretation of industrialization in the South, these writings show that the benefits of innovations had to be carefully weighed against the costs to both industry and society. The essays consider a wide range of innovative technologies. Some examine specific industries in subregions: steamboats in the lower Mississippi valley, textile manufacturing in Georgia and Arkansas, coal mining in Virginia, and sugar planting and processing in Louisiana. Others consider the role of technology in South Carolina textile mills around the turn of the twentieth century, the electrification of the Tennessee valley, and telemedicine in contemporary Arizona--marking the expansion of the region into the southwestern Sunbelt. Together, these articles show that southerners set significant limitations on what technological innovations they were willing to adopt, particularly in a milieu where slaveholding agriculture had shaped the allocation of resources. They also reveal how scarcity of capital and continued reliance on agriculture influenced that allocation into the twentieth century, relieved eventually by federal spending during the Depression and its aftermath that sparked the Sunbelt South's economic boom. Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization clearly demonstrates that the South's embrace of technological innovation in the modern era doesn't mark a radical change from the past but rather signals that such pursuits were always part of the region's economy. It deflates the myth of southern agrarianism while expanding the scope of antebellum American industrialization beyond the Northeast and offers new insights into the relationship of southern economic history to the region's society and politics.
Download or read book Final Report of the Southern Growth Policies Board Task Force on the Southern Economy written by Southern Growth Policies Board. Task Force on the Southern Economy and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The South the Nation and the World written by David Lee Carlton and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays, the authors argue that the chronic economic difficulties of the American South cannot be explained away as resulting from a distinctive 'premodern' business climate, since there was little variation between regional business climates during the Antebellum period.
Download or read book This Vast Southern Empire written by Matthew Karp and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the John H. Dunning Prize, American Historical Association Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Winner of the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Winner of the North Jersey Civil War Round Table Book Award Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize, Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics. “At the close of the Civil War, more than Southern independence and the bones of the dead lay amid the smoking ruins of the Confederacy. Also lost was the memory of the prewar decades, when Southern politicians and pro-slavery ambitions shaped the foreign policy of the United States in order to protect slavery at home and advance its interests abroad. With This Vast Southern Empire, Matthew Karp recovers that forgotten history and presents it in fascinating and often surprising detail.” —Fergus Bordewich, Wall Street Journal “Matthew Karp’s illuminating book This Vast Southern Empire shows that the South was interested not only in gaining new slave territory but also in promoting slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere.” —David S. Reynolds, New York Review of Books
Download or read book More Pricks Than Kicks written by Samuel Beckett and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Beckett, the recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the greatest writers of our century, first published these ten short stories in 1934; they originally formed part of an unfinished novel. They trace the career of the first of Beckett’s antiheroes, Belacqua Shuah. Belacqua is a student, a philanderer, and a failure, and Beckett portrays the various aspects of his troubled existence: he studies Dante, attempts an ill-fated courtship, witnesses grotesque incidents in the streets of Dublin, attends vapid parties, endures his marriage, and meets his accidental death. These early stories point to the qualities of precision, restraint, satire, and poetry found in Beckett’s mature works, and reveal the beginning stages of Beckett’s underlying theme of bewilderment in the face of suffering.
Download or read book The Southern Economy written by Art Carden and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay surveys some of the key themes in Southern economic history and traces the development of the region through the colonial and revolutionary eras, the antebellum period, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the post-bellum period, and the modern period. In particular, I highlight the findings of economic historians on the economics of slavery and focus on the development of Southern institutions in light of the antebellum slave society. The resurgence of the Southern economy is examined in light of recent hypotheses about technological change, policy, and productivity growth.
Download or read book The South in the Building of the Nation written by Edwin Mims and published by Pelican Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1900 there was a general agreement among Southerners on the need for a comprehensive history of the Southern states. It had been and was a nation, sharing beliefs, traditions, and culture. This series, originally published in 1909, is a record of the Southï¿1/2s part in the making of the American nation. It portrays the character, the genius, the achievements, and the progress in the life of the Southern people. At the time of its publication, this was the most extensive study of economic conditions since J. D. B. DeBow wrote The Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States in 1852 and 1853. Focusing on the period 1607-1865, this volume examines all aspects affecting the development of the Southern economy. Factors contributing to the Civil War, particularly the economics of slavery and free labor, are discussed.
Download or read book Race and Schooling in the South 1880 1950 written by Robert A. Margo and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interrelation among race, schooling, and labor market opportunities of American blacks can help us make sense of the relatively poor economic status of blacks in contemporary society. The role of these factors in slavery and the economic consequences for blacks has received much attention, but the post-slave experience of blacks in the American economy has been less studied. To deepen our understanding of that experience, Robert A. Margo mines a wealth of newly available census data and school district records. By analyzing evidence concerning occupational discrimination, educational expenditures, taxation, and teachers' salaries, he clarifies the costs for blacks of post-slave segregation. "A concise, lucid account of the bases of racial inequality in the South between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era. . . . Deserves the careful attention of anyone concerned with historical and contemporary race stratification."—Kathryn M. Neckerman, Contemporary Sociology "Margo has produced an excellent study, which can serve as a model for aspiring cliometricians. To describe it as 'required reading' would fail to indicate just how important, indeed indispensable, the book will be to scholars interested in racial economic differences, past or present."—Robert Higgs, Journal of Economic Literature "Margo shows that history is important in understanding present domestic problems; his study has significant implications for understanding post-1950s black economic development."—Joe M. Richardson, Journal of American History
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Southern Politics written by Charles S. Bullock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty-three essays included in The Oxford Handbook of Southern Politics present a definitive view of the factors that contribute to the South's distinctive politics, examining these factors in the context of the region's political development since World War II.
