Download or read book Buncombe Bob written by Julian M. Pleasants and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-07-11 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Rice Reynolds (1884-1963), U.S. senator from North Carolina from 1933 to 1945, was one of the most eccentric politicians in American history. His travels, his five marriages, his public faux pas, and his flamboyant campaigns provided years of amusement for his constituents. This political biography rescues Reynolds from his cartoon-character reputation, however, by explaining his political appeal and highlighting his genuine contributions without overlooking his flaws. Julian Pleasants argues that Reynolds must be understood in the context of Depression-era North Carolina. He capitalized on the discontent of the poverty-stricken lower class by campaigning in tattered clothes while driving a ramshackle Model T--a sharp contrast to his wealthy, chauffeur-driven opponent, incumbent senator Cam Morrison. In office, Reynolds supported Roosevelt's New Deal. Although he was not pro-Nazi, his isolationist stance and his association with virulent right-wingers enraged his constituents and ultimately led to his withdrawal from politics. Pleasants reveals Reynolds to be a showman of the first order, a skilled practitioner of class politics, and a unique southern politician--the only one who favored the New Deal while advocating isolationist views.

Download or read book A Fabric of Defeat written by Bryant Simon and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Bryant Simon brings to life the politics of white South Carolina millhands during the first half of the twentieth century. His revealing and moving account explores how this group of southern laborers thought about and participated in politics and public power. Taking a broad view of politics, Simon looks at laborers as they engaged in political activity in many venues--at the polling station, on front porches, and on the shop floor--and examines their political involvement at the local, state, and national levels. He describes the campaign styles and rhetoric of such politicians as Coleman Blease and Olin Johnston (himself a former millhand), who eagerly sought the workers' votes. He draws a detailed picture of mill workers casting ballots, carrying placards, marching on the state capital, writing to lawmakers, and picketing factories. These millhands' politics reflected their public and private thoughts about whiteness and blackness, war and the New Deal, democracy and justice, gender and sexuality, class relations and consumption. Ultimately, the people depicted here are neither romanticized nor dismissed as the stereotypically racist and uneducated "rednecks" found in many accounts of southern politics. Southern workers understood the political and social forces that shaped their lives, argues Simon, and they developed complex political strategies to deal with those forces.

Download or read book The Last Great Strike written by Ahmed White and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-01-04 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1937, seventy thousand workers walked off their jobs at four large steel companies known collectively as ÒLittle Steel.Ó The strikers sought to make the companies retreat from decades of antiunion repression, abide by the newly enacted federal labor law, and recognize their union. For two months a grinding struggle unfolded, punctuated by bloody clashes in which police, company agents, and National Guardsmen ruthlessly beat and shot unionists. At least sixteen died and hundreds more were injured before the strike ended in failure. The violence and brutality of the Little Steel Strike became legendary. In many ways it was the last great strike in modern America. Ê Traditionally the Little Steel Strike has been understood as a modest setback for steel workers, one that actually confirmed the potency of New Deal reforms and did little to impede the progress of the labor movement. However,ÊThe Last Great StrikeÊtells a different story about the conflict and its significance for unions and labor rights. More than any other strike, it laid bare the contradictions of the industrial labor movement, the resilience of corporate power, and the limits of New Deal liberalism at a crucial time in American history.

Download or read book Carolina Comments written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book W E B Du Bois 1919 1963 written by David Levering Lewis and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-09 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lewis charts the second half of Du Bois's career, from the end of World War I on.

Download or read book The History of the North Carolina Communist Party written by Gregory S. Taylor and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a re-evaluation of the objectives and actions of the 'Tar Heel Reds' from the 1920s to the 1960s. The author argues that, contrary to widely held belief, they were not a threat to national security, nor were they beholden to the Soviet Union and that their aims are now accepted parts of the national consensus.

Download or read book Death Blow to Jim Crow written by Erik S. Gellman and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Great Depression, black intellectuals, labor organizers, and artists formed the National Negro Congress (NNC) to demand a "second emancipation" in America. Over the next decade, the NNC and its offshoot, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, sought to coordinate and catalyze local antiracist activism into a national movement to undermine the Jim Crow system of racial and economic exploitation. In this pioneering study, Erik S. Gellman shows how the NNC agitated for the first-class citizenship of African Americans and all members of the working class, establishing civil rights as necessary for reinvigorating American democracy. Much more than just a precursor to the 1960s civil rights movement, this activism created the most militant interracial freedom movement since Reconstruction, one that sought to empower the American labor movement to make demands on industrialists, white supremacists, and the state as never before. By focusing on the complex alliances between unions, civic groups, and the Communist Party in five geographic regions, Gellman explains how the NNC and its allies developed and implemented creative grassroots strategies to weaken Jim Crow, if not deal it the "death blow" they sought.

Download or read book Bob Kuhn written by James McNutt and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-09-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “For those of us who portray wildlife . . . our decision to persist in our quest for excellence is almost always based on a love affair, a fascination with the creatures of our planet, and a need to share this feeling the best way we know how.” So said wildlife artist Robert Kuhn (1920–2007), who spent a lifetime sketching and painting animals, and generously mentoring other artists. Bob Kuhn: Drawing on Instinct presents a generous sampling of his rarely seen sketches alongside the vibrant paintings for which he is best known. Appearing in conjunction with a traveling exhibit mounted by the National Museum of Wildlife Art, in Jackson, Wyoming, this book allows readers to observe the artistic process of one of the greatest wildlife artists of our time. Curator Adam Duncan Harris provides an introduction and a biography of Kuhn, along with an examination of his working method. In addition, Bob Kuhn features four substantive essays by leading authorities on American art: James H. Nottage of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Amy Scott of the Autry National Center, Lisa M. Strong of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Todd Wilkinson of Wildlife Art Journal and other publications. These contributions, written from a variety of art historical perspectives, set Kuhn’s oeuvre within the cultural context in which he worked and deepen our understanding of his achievements. Complementing the essays are brief appreciations by six of Kuhn’s contemporaries and three samples of the artist’s own writing. Bob Kuhn: Drawing on Instinct offers a compelling blend of the artist’s finished paintings and finest sketches—works of art in their own right. This lavishly illustrated book is a fitting tribute that will further establish Bob Kuhn’s place in the pantheon of late-twentieth-century American artists.

Download or read book Barbecue written by Robert F. Moss and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of an iconic American food, with new chapters, sidebars, and updated historical accounts The full story of barbecue in the United States had been virtually untold before Robert F. Moss revealed its long, rich history in his 2010 book Barbecue: The History of an American Institution. Moss researched hundreds of sources—newspapers, letters, journals, diaries, and travel narratives—to document the evolution of barbecue from its origins among Native Americans to its present status as an icon of American culture. He mapped out the development of the rich array of regional barbecue styles, chronicled the rise of barbecue restaurants, and profiled the famed pitmasters who made the tradition what it is today. Barbecue is the story not just of a dish but also of a social institution that helped shape many regional cultures of the United States. The history begins with British colonists’ adoption of barbecuing techniques from Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries, moves to barbecue’s establishment as the preeminent form of public celebration in the 19th century, and is carried through to barbecue’s ubiquitous standing today. From the very beginning, barbecues were powerful social magnets, drawing together people from a wide range of classes and geographic backgrounds. Barbecue played a key role in three centuries of American history, both reflecting and influencing the direction of an evolving society. By tracing the story of barbecue from its origins to today, Barbecue: The History of an American Institution traces the very thread of American social history. Moss has made significant updates in this new edition, offering a wealth of new historical research, sources, illustrations, and anecdotes.

Download or read book Staging the People written by Elizabeth A. Osborne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal plan to fund theatre and other live artistic performances during the Great Depression, had the primary goal of employing out-of-work artists, writers, and directors, with the secondary aim of entertaining poor families and creating relevant art. These case studies explore the ties between the Federal Theatre Project and regional communities throughout the United States.

Download or read book Ben Shahn s New Deal Murals written by Diana L. Linden and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of Ben Shahn’s New Deal murals (1933–43) in the context of American Jewish history, labor history, and public discourse. Lithuanian-born artist Ben Shahn learned fresco painting as an assistant to Diego Rivera in the 1930s and created his own visually powerful, technically sophisticated, and stylistically innovative artworks as part of the New Deal Arts Project’s national mural program. InBen Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene author Diana L. Linden demonstrates that Shahn mined his Jewish heritage and left-leaning politics for his style and subject matter, offering insight into his murals’ creation and their sometimes complicated reception by officials, the public, and the press. In four chapters, Linden presents case studies of select Shahn murals that were created from 1933 to 1943 and are located in public buildings in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri. She studies Shahn’s famous untitled fresco for the Jersey Homesteads—a utopian socialist cooperative community populated with former Jewish garment workers and funded under the New Deal—Shahn’s mural for the Bronx Central Post Office, a fresco Shahn proposed to the post office in St. Louis, and a related one-panel easel painting titled The First Amendment located in a Queens, New York, post office. By investigating the role of Jewish identity in Shahn’s works, Linden considers the artist’s responses to important issues of the era, such as President Roosevelt’s opposition to open immigration to the United States, New York’s bustling garment industry and its labor unions, ideological concerns about freedom and liberty that had signifcant meaning to Jews, and the encroachment of censorship into American art. Linden shows that throughout his public murals, Shahn literally painted Jews into the American scene with his subjects, themes, and compositions. Readers interested in Jewish American history, art history, and Depression-era American culture will enjoy this insightful volume.

Download or read book Hearts of Wisdom written by Emily K. Abel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of the female caregiver holding a midnight vigil at the bedside of a sick relative is so firmly rooted in our collective imagination we might assume that such caregiving would have attracted the scrutiny of numerous historians. As Emily Abel demonstrates in this groundbreaking study of caregiving in America across class and ethnic divides and over the course of ninety years, this has hardly been the case. While caring for sick and disabled family members was commonplace for women in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, that caregiving, the caregivers' experience of it, and the medical profession's reaction to it took diverse and sometimes unexpected forms. A complex series of historical changes, Abel shows, has profoundly altered the content and cultural meaning of care. Hearts of Wisdom is an immersion into that "world of care." Drawing on antebellum slave narratives, white farm women's diaries, and public health records, Abel puts together a multifaceted picture of what caregiving meant to American women--and what it cost them--from the pre-Civil War years to the brink of America's entry into the Second World War. She shows that caregiving offered women an arena in which experience could be parlayed into expertise, while at the same time the revolution in bacteriology and the transformation of the formal health care system were weakening women's claim to that expertise. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction Part One: 1850-1890 1. "Hot Flannels, Hot Teas, and a Great Deal of Care": Emily Hawley Gillespie and Sarah Gillespie, 1858-1888 2. An Overview of Nineteenth-Century Caregiving 3. "Tried at the Quilting Bees": Con'icts between "Old Ladies" and Aspiring Professionals Part Two: 1890-1940 4. A "Terrible and Exhausting" Struggle: Martha Shaw Farnsworth, 1890-1924 5. "Just as You Direct": Caregiver Translations of Medical Authority 6. Negotiating Public Health Directives: Poor New Yorkers at the Turn of the Century Reviews of this book: This excellent historical review of female caregiving within families as a transformative experience identifies conditions that make this form of human connectedness rewarding and meaningful. --J.E. Thompson, Choice This is a breathtaking work in terms of its depth and its breadth. Emily Abel's research is impressive in its time frame, wide range of topics, and wonderful source material. What she has given us, for the first time, is a full-length study of the female support network, not only for childbirth but for a whole range of health issues. With her pleasing writing style and clear, readable prose, she gives us much more than mere glimpses of anonymous people--she provides the reader with a sense of the texture of human lives. --Susan L. Smith, University of Alberta The reader of Hearts of Wisdom is surprised by the topic and content, but is left with the sense that the most central story of human possibility has been left out of all other history books. The work offers a substantive contribution to history, feminist scholarship, caregiving professions, and informal caregivers. --Patricia Benner, R.N., Ph.D, University of California, San Francisco

Download or read book Lum and Abner written by Randal L. Hall and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1930s radio stations filled the airwaves with programs and musical performances about rural Americans—farmers and small-town residents struggling through the Great Depression. One of the most popular of these shows was Lum and Abner, the brainchild of Chester "Chet" Lauck and Norris "Tuffy" Goff, two young businessmen from Arkansas. Beginning in 1931 and lasting for more than two decades, the show revolved around the lives of ordinary people in the fictional community of Pine Ridge, based on the hamlet of Waters, Arkansas. The title characters, who are farmers, local officials, and the keepers of the Jot 'Em Down Store, manage to entangle themselves in a variety of hilarious dilemmas. The program's gentle humor and often complex characters had wide appeal both to rural southerners, who were accustomed to being the butt of jokes in the national media, and to urban listeners who were fascinated by descriptions of life in the American countryside. Lum and Abner was characterized by the snappy, verbal comedic dueling that became popular on radio programs of the 1930s. Using this format, Lauck and Goff allowed their characters to subvert traditional authority and to poke fun at common misconceptions about rural life. The show also featured hillbilly and other popular music, an innovation that drew a bigger audience. As a result, Arkansas experienced a boom in tourism, and southern listeners began to immerse themselves in a new national popular culture. In Lum and Abner: Rural America and the Golden Age of Radio, historian Randal L. Hall explains the history and importance of the program, its creators, and its national audience. He also presents a treasure trove of twenty-nine previously unavailable scripts from the show's earliest period, scripts that reveal much about the Great Depression, rural life, hillbilly stereotypes, and a seminal period of American radio.

Download or read book Annual Report of the Archivist of the United States written by National Archives (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1937 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Reviewing the South written by Sarah Gardner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American South received increased attention from national commentators during the interwar era. Beginning in the 1920s, the proliferation of daily book columns and Sunday book supplements in newspapers reflected a growing audience of educated readers and its demand for books and book reviews. This period of intensified scrutiny coincided with a boom in the publishing industry, which, in turn, encouraged newspapers to pay greater attention to the world of books. Reviewing the South shows how northern critics were as much involved in the Southern Literary Renaissance as Southern authors and critics. Southern writing, Gardner argues, served as a litmus to gauge Southern exceptionalism. For critics and their readers, nothing less than the region's ability to contribute to the vibrancy and growth of the nation was at stake.

Download or read book A Taste for Purity written by Julia Hauser and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In nineteenth-century Europe and North America, an organized vegetarian movement began warning of the health risks and ethical problems of meat eating. Presenting a vegetarian diet as a cure for the social ills brought on by industrialization and urbanization, this movement idealized South Asia as a model. In colonial India, where diets were far more varied than Western admirers realized, new motives for avoiding meat also took hold. Hindu nationalists claimed that vegetarianism would cleanse the body for anticolonial resistance, and an increasingly militant cow protection movement mobilized against meat eaters, particularly Muslims. Unearthing the connections among these developments and many others, Julia Hauser explores the global history of vegetarianism from the mid-nineteenth century to the early Cold War. She traces personal networks and exchanges of knowledge spanning Europe, the United States, and South Asia, highlighting mutual influence as well as the disconnects of cross-cultural encounters. Hauser argues that vegetarianism in this period was motivated by expansive visions of moral, physical, and even racial purification. Adherents were convinced that society could be changed by transforming the body of the individual. Hauser demonstrates that vegetarians in India and the West shared notions of purity, which drew some toward not only internationalism and anticolonialism but also racism, nationalism, and violence. Finding preoccupations with race and masculinity as well as links to colonialism and eugenics, she reveals the implication of vegetarian movements in exclusionary, hierarchical projects. Deeply researched and compellingly argued, A Taste for Purity rewrites the history of vegetarianism on a global scale.

Download or read book The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North written by Brian Purnell and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did American racism originate in the liberal North? An inquiry into the system of institutionalized racism created by Northern Jim Crow Jim Crow was not a regional sickness, it was a national cancer. Even at the high point of twentieth century liberalism in the North, Jim Crow racism hid in plain sight. Perpetuated by colorblind arguments about “cultures of poverty,” policies focused more on black criminality than black equality. Procedures that diverted resources in education, housing, and jobs away from poor black people turned ghettos and prisons into social pandemics. Americans in the North made this history. They tried to unmake it, too. Liberalism, rather than lighting the way to vanquish the darkness of the Jim Crow North gave racism new and complex places to hide. The twelve original essays in this anthology unveil Jim Crow’s many strange careers in the North. They accomplish two goals: first, they show how the Jim Crow North worked as a system to maintain social, economic, and political inequality in the nation’s most liberal places; and second, they chronicle how activists worked to undo the legal, economic, and social inequities born of Northern Jim Crow policies, practices, and ideas. The book ultimately dispels the myth that the South was the birthplace of American racism, and presents a compelling argument that American racism actually originated in the North.