Download or read book Up from the Mudsills of Hell written by Connie L. Lester and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2006-12-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Up from the Mudsills of Hell analyzes agrarian activism in Tennessee from the 1870s to 1915 within the context of farmers’ lives, community institutions, and familial and communal networks. Locating the origins of the agrarian movements in the state’s late antebellum and post-Civil War farm economy, Connie Lester traces the development of rural reform from the cooperative efforts of the Grange, the Agricultural Wheel, and the Farmers’ Alliance through the insurgency of the People’s Party and the emerging rural bureaucracy of the Cooperative Extension Service and the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. Lester ties together a rich and often contradictory history of cooperativism, prohibition, disfranchisement, labor conflicts, and third-party politics to show that Tennessee agrarianism was more complex and threatening to the established political and economic order than previously recognized. As farmers reached across gender, racial, and political boundaries to create a mass movement, they shifted the ground under the monoliths of southern life. Once the Democratic Party had destroyed the insurgency, farmers responded in both traditional and progressive ways. Some turned inward, focusing on a localism that promoted--sometimes through violence--rigid adherence to established social boundaries. Others, however, organized into the Farmers’ Union, whose membership infiltrated the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and the Cooperative Extension Service. Acting through these bureaucracies, Tennessee agrarian leaders exerted an important influence over the development of agricultural legislation for the twentieth century. Up from the Mudsills of Hell not only provides an important reassessment of agrarian reform and radicalism in Tennessee, but also links this Upper South state into the broader sweep of southern and American farm movements emerging in the late nineteenth century.

Download or read book The American South written by William James Cooper (Jr.) and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The American South, William J. Cooper, Jr. and Thomas E. Terrill demonstrate their belief that it is impossible to divorce the history of the south from the history of the United States. Each volume includes a substantial biographical essay--completely updated for this edition--which provides the reader with a guide to literature on the history of the South. Coverage now includes the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, up-to-date analysis of the persistent racial divisions in the region, and the South's unanticipated role in the 2008 presidential primaries.

Download or read book Making the Bible Belt written by Joseph L. Locke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making the Bible Belt upends notions of a longstanding, stable marriage between political religion and the American South. H.L. Mencken coined the term "the Bible Belt" in the 1920s to capture the peculiar alliance of religion and public life in the South, but the reality he described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. Into the twentieth century, a robust anticlerical tradition still challenged religious forays into southern politics. Inside southern churches, an insular evangelical theology looked suspiciously on political meddling. Outside of the churches, a popular anticlericalism indicted activist ministers with breaching the boundaries of their proper spheres of influence, calling up historical memories of the Dark Ages and Puritan witch hunts. Through the politics of prohibition, and in the face of bitter resistance, a complex but shared commitment to expanding the power and scope of religion transformed southern evangelicals' inward-looking restraints into an aggressive, self-assertive, and unapologetic political activism. The decades-long religious crusade to close saloons and outlaw alcohol in the South absorbed the energies of southern churches and thrust religious leaders headlong into the political process--even as their forays into southern politics were challenged at every step. Early defeats impelled prohibitionist clergy to recast their campaign as a broader effort not merely to dry up the South, but to conquer anticlerical opposition and inject religion into public life. Clerical activists churned notions of history, race, gender, and religion into a powerful political movement and elevated ambitious leaders such as the pugnacious fundamentalist J. Frank Norris and Senator Morris Sheppard, the "Father of National Prohibition." Exploring the controversies surrounding the religious support of prohibition in Texas, Making the Bible Belt reconstructs the purposeful, decades-long campaign to politicize southern religion, hints at the historical origins of the religious right, and explores a compelling and transformative moment in American history.

Download or read book Populism in the South Revisited written by James M. Beeby and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Populist Movement was the largest mass movement for political and economic change in the history of the American South until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Populist Movement in this book is defined as the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party, as well as the Agricultural Wheel and Knights of Labor in the 1880s and 1890s. The Populists threatened the political hegemony of the white racist southern Democratic Party during populism's high point in the mid-1890s; and the populists threw the New South into a state of turmoil Populism in the South Revisited: New Interpretations and New Departures brings together nine of the best new works on the populist movement in the South that grapple with several larger themes—such as the nature of political insurgency, the relationship between African Americans and whites, electoral reform, new economic policies and producerism, and the relationship between rural and urban areas—in case studies that center on several states and at the local level. Each essay offers both new research and new interpretations into the causes, course, and consequences of the populist insurgency. One essay analyzes how notions of debt informed the Populist insurgency in North Carolina, the one state where the Populists achieved statewide power, while another analyzes the Populists' failed attempts in Grant Parish, Louisiana, to align with African Americans and Republicans to topple the incumbent Democrats. Other topics covered include populist grassroots organizing with African Americans to stop disfranchisement in North Carolina; the Knights of Labor and the relationship with populism in Georgia; organizing urban populism in Dallas, Texas; Tom Watson's relationship with Midwest Populism; the centrality of African Americans in populism, a comparative analysis of Populism across the Deep South, and how the rhetoric and ideology of populism impacted socialism and the Garvey movement in the early twentieth century. Together these studies offer new insights into the nature of southern populism and the legacy of the Peoples' Party in the South.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Populism in America 2 volumes written by Alexandra Kindell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 1903 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive two-volume encyclopedia documents how Populism, which grew out of post-Civil War agrarian discontent, was the apex of populist impulses in American culture from colonial times to the present. The Populist Movement was founded in the late 1800s when farmers and other agrarian workers formed cooperative societies to fight exploitation by big banks and corporations. Today, Populism encompasses both right-wing and left-wing movements, organizations, and icons. This valuable encyclopedia examines how ordinary people have voiced their opposition to the prevailing political, economic, and social constructs of the past as well how the elite or leaders at the time have reacted to that opposition. The entries spotlight the people, events, organizations, and ideas that created this first major challenge to the two-party system in the United States. Additionally, attention is paid to important historical actors who are not traditionally considered "Populist" but were instrumental in paving the way for the movement—or vigorously resisted Populism's influence on American culture. This encyclopedia also shows that Populism as a specific movement, and populism as an idea, have served alternately to further equal rights in America—and to limit them.

Download or read book Building a New Educational State written by Joan Malczewski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building a New Educational State examines the dynamic process of black education reform during the Jim Crow era in North Carolina and Mississippi. Through extensive archival research, Joan Malczewski explores the initiatives of foundations and reformers at the top, the impact of their work at the state and local level, and the agency of southerners—including those in rural black communities—to demonstrate the importance of schooling to political development in the South. Along the way, Malczewski challenges us to reevaluate the relationships among political actors involved in education reform. Malczewski presents foundation leaders as self-conscious state builders and policy entrepreneurs who aimed to promote national ideals through a public system of education—efforts they believed were especially critical in the South. Black education was an important component of this national agenda. Through extensive efforts to create a more centralized and standard system of public education aimed at bringing isolated and rural black schools into the public system, schools became important places for expanding the capacity of state and local governance. Schooling provided opportunities to reorganize local communities and augment black agency in the process. When foundations realized they could not unilaterally impose their educational vision on the South, particularly in black communities, they began to collaborate with locals, thereby opening political opportunity in rural areas. Unfortunately, while foundations were effective at developing the institutional configurations necessary for education reform, they were less successful at implementing local programs consistently due to each state’s distinctive political and institutional context.

Download or read book A Companion to American Agricultural History written by R. Douglas Hurt and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a solid foundation for understanding American agricultural history and offers new directions for research A Companion to American Agricultural History addresses the key aspects of America’s complex agricultural past from 8,000 BCE to the first decades of the twenty-first century. Bringing together more than thirty original essays by both established and emerging scholars, this innovative volume presents a succinct and accessible overview of American agricultural history while delivering a state-of-the-art assessment of modern scholarship on a diversity of subjects, themes, and issues. The essays provide readers with starting points for their exploration of American agricultural history—whether in general or in regards to a specific topic—and highlights the many ways the agricultural history of America is of integral importance to the wider American experience. Individual essays trace the origin and development of agricultural politics and policies, examine changes in science, technology, and government regulations, offer analytical suggestions for new research areas, discuss matters of ethnicity and gender in American agriculture, and more. This Companion: Introduces readers to a uniquely wide range of topics within the study of American agricultural history Provides a narrative summary and a critical examination of field-defining works Introduces specific topics within American agricultural history such as agrarian reform, agribusiness, and agricultural power and production Discusses the impacts of American agriculture on different groups including Native Americans, African Americans, and European, Asian, and Latinx immigrants Views the agricultural history of America through new interdisciplinary lenses of race, class, and the environment Explores depictions of American agriculture in film, popular music, literature, and art A Companion to American Agricultural History is an essential resource for introductory students and general readers seeking a concise overview of the subject, and for graduate students and scholars wanting to learn about a particular aspect of American agricultural history.

Download or read book Jenkins of Mexico written by Andrew Paxman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the city of Puebla there lived an American who made himself into the richest man in Mexico. Driven by a steely desire to prove himself-first to his wife's family, then to Mexican elites-William O. Jenkins rose from humble origins in Tennessee to build a business empire in a country energized by industrialization and revolutionary change. In Jenkins of Mexico, Andrew Paxman presents the first biography of this larger-than-life personality. When the decade-long Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910, Jenkins preyed on patrician property owners and bought up substantial real estate. He suffered a scare with a firing squad and then a kidnapping by rebels, an episode that almost triggered a US invasion. After the war he owned textile mills, developed Mexico's most productive sugar plantation, and helped finance the rise of a major political family, the Ávila Camachos. During the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s-50s, he lorded over the film industry with his movie theater monopoly and key role in production. By means of Mexico's first major hostile takeover, he bought the country's second-largest bank. Reputed as an exploiter of workers, a puppet-master of politicians, and Mexico's wealthiest industrialist, Jenkins was the gringo that Mexicans loved to loathe. After his wife's death, he embraced philanthropy and willed his entire fortune to a foundation named for her, which co-founded two prestigious universities and funded projects to improve the lives of the poor in his adopted country. Using interviews with Jenkins' descendants, family papers, and archives in Puebla, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Washington, Jenkins of Mexico tells a contradictory tale of entrepreneurship and monopoly, fearless individualism and cozy deals with power-brokers, embrace of US-style capitalism and political anti-Americanism, and Mexico's transformation from semi-feudal society to emerging economic power.

Download or read book The A to Z of the Progressive Era written by Peter C. Holloran and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-09-24 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Progressive Era, the period in the United States between 1898 and 1917, was a time of great social, political, and industrial change. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, an event that signaled the emergence of the United States as a great power, the country soon was involved in its first overseas guerrilla war, in the Philippines. Vast changes in communications and transportation, immigration and migration patterns, social mores, gender roles, family structure, class structure, work patterns, business methods, education, intellectual life, religion, the professions, technology, science, medicine, and much else were transforming the scope and feel of people's lives and relationships. In many ways what happened in this era set the agenda for the rest of the 20th century. The A to Z of the Progressive Era is the most comprehensive and coherent reference work on the Progressive Era. Through its chronology, introductory essay, bibliography, appendixes, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the key events, people, organizations, and ideas of the period, this resource is a lively, complete, and accessible overview of this significant era.

Download or read book Bloody Breathitt written by T.R.C. Hutton and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-09-20 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses the history of Breathitt County, Kentucky, to examine political violence in the United States and its interpretation in media and memory. Violence in Breathitt County, during and after the Civil War, usually reflected what was going on elsewhere in Kentucky and the American South. In turn, the types of violence recorded there corresponded with discernible political scenarios.

Download or read book The Price of Permanence written by William D. Bryan and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the lens of environmental history, William D. Bryan provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the post–Civil War South by framing the New South as a struggle over environmental stewardship. For more than six decades, scholars have caricatured southerners as so desperate for economic growth that they rapaciously consumed the region’s abundant natural resources. Yet business leaders and public officials did not see profit and environmental quality as mutually exclusive goals, and they promoted methods of conserving resources that they thought would ensure long-term economic growth. Southerners called this idea "permanence." But permanence was a contested concept, and these businesspeople clashed with other stakeholders as they struggled to find new ways of using valuable resources. The Price of Permanence shows how these struggles indelibly shaped the modern South. Bryan writes the region into the national conservation movement for the first time and shows that business leaders played a key role shaping the ideals of American conservationists. This book also dismantles one of the most persistent caricatures of southerners: that they had little interest in environmental quality. Conservation provided white elites with a tool for social control, and this is the first work to show how struggles over resource policy fueled Jim Crow. The ideology of "permanence" protected some resources but did not prevent degradation of the environment overall, and The Price of Permanence ultimately uses lessons from the New South to reflect on sustainability today.

Download or read book A New History of the American South written by W. Fitzhugh Brundage and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For at least two centuries, the South's economy, politics, religion, race relations, fiction, music, foodways and more have figured prominently in nearly all facets of American life. In A New History of the American South, W. Fitzhugh Brundage joins a stellar group of accomplished historians in gracefully weaving a new narrative of southern history from its ancient past to the present. This groundbreaking work draws on both well-established and new currents in scholarship, among them global and Atlantic world history, histories of African diaspora, and environmental history. The volume also considers the experiences of all people of the South: Black, white, Indigenous, female, male, poor, and elite. Together, the essays compose a seamless, cogent, and engaging work that can be read cover to cover or sampled at leisure. Contributors are Peter A. Coclanis, Gregory P. Downs, Laura F. Edwards, Robbie Ethridge, Kari Frederickson, Paul Harvey, Kenneth R. Janken, Martha S. Jones, Blair L. M. Kelley, Kate Masur, Michael A. McDonnell, Scott Reynolds Nelson, James D. Rice, Natalie J. Ring, and Jon F. Sensbach.

Download or read book Agrarian Crossings written by Tore C. Olsson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. Agrarian Crossings tells the story of how these campaigns were conducted in dialogue with one another as reformers in each nation came to exchange models, plans, and strategies with their equivalents across the border. Dismantling the artificial boundaries that can divide American and Latin American history, Tore Olsson shows how the agrarian histories of both regions share far more than we realize. He traces the connections between the US South and the plantation zones of Mexico, places that suffered parallel problems of environmental decline, rural poverty, and gross inequities in land tenure. Bringing this tumultuous era vividly to life, he describes how Roosevelt’s New Deal drew on Mexican revolutionary agrarianism to shape its program for the rural South. Olsson also looks at how the US South served as the domestic laboratory for the Rockefeller Foundation’s “green revolution” in Mexico—which would become the most important Third World development campaign of the twentieth century—and how the Mexican government attempted to replicate the hydraulic development of the Tennessee Valley Authority after World War II. Rather than a comparative history, Agrarian Crossings is an innovative history of comparisons and the ways they affected policy, moved people, and reshaped the landscape.

Download or read book Grand Army of Labor written by Matthew E. Stanley and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlisting memory in a new fight for freedom From the Gilded Age through the Progressive era, labor movements reinterpreted Abraham Lincoln as a liberator of working people while workers equated activism with their own service fighting for freedom during the war. Matthew E. Stanley explores the wide-ranging meanings and diverse imagery used by Civil War veterans within the sprawling radical politics of the time. As he shows, a rich world of rituals, songs, speeches, and newspapers emerged among the many strains of working class cultural politics within the labor movement. Yet tensions arose even among allies. Some people rooted Civil War commemoration in nationalism and reform, and in time, these conservative currents marginalized radical workers who tied their remembering to revolution, internationalism, and socialism. An original consideration of meaning and memory, Grand Army of Labor reveals the complex ways workers drew on themes of emancipation and equality in the long battle for workers’ rights.

Download or read book Declarations of Dependence written by Gregory P. Downs and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly original study, Gregory Downs argues that the most American of wars, the Civil War, created a seemingly un-American popular politics, rooted not in independence but in voluntary claims of dependence. Through an examination of the pleas and

Download or read book The People s Revolt written by Gregg Cantrell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging and meticulously researched history of Texas Populism and its contributions to modern American liberalism In the years after the Civil War, the banks, railroads, and industrial corporations of Gilded-Age America, abetted by a corrupt political system, concentrated vast wealth in the hands of the few and made poverty the fate of many. In response, a group of hard-pressed farmers and laborers from Texas organized a movement for economic justice called the Texas People's Party--the original Populists. Arguing that these Texas Populists were among the first to elaborate the set of ideas that would eventually become known as modern liberalism, Gregg Cantrell shows how the group broke new ground in reaching out to African Americans and Mexican Americans, rethinking traditional gender roles, and demanding creative solutions and forceful government intervention to solve economic inequality. Although their political movement ultimately failed, this volume reveals how the ideas of the Texas People's Party have shaped American political history.

Download or read book Tennessee Women written by Sarah Wilkerson Freeman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including suffragists, civil rights activists, and movers and shakers in politics and in the music industries of Nashville and Memphis, as well as many other notables, this collective portrait of Tennessee women offers new perspectives and insights into their dreams, their struggles, and their times. As rich, diverse, and wide-ranging as the topography of the state, this book will interest scholars, general readers, and students of southern history, women's history, and Tennessee history. Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times shifts the historical lens from the more traditional view of men's roles to place women and their experiences at center stage in the historical drama. The eighteen biographical essays, written by leading historians of women, illuminate the lives of familiar figures like reformer Frances Wright, blueswoman Alberta Hunter, and the Grand Ole Opry's Minnie Pearl (Sarah Colley Cannon) and less-well-known characters like the Cherokee Beloved Woman Nan-ye-hi (Nancy Ward), antebellum free black woman Milly Swan Price, and environmentalist Doris Bradshaw. Told against the backdrop of their times, these are the life stories of women who shaped Tennessee's history from the eighteenth-century challenges of western expansion through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century struggles against racial and gender oppression to the twenty-first-century battles with community degradation. Taken as a whole, this collection of women's stories illuminates previously unrevealed historical dimensions that give readers a greater understanding of Tennessee's place within environmental and human rights movements and its role as a generator of phenomenal cultural life.