Download or read book Travel On Southern Antebellum Railroads 1828 1860 written by Eugene Alvarez and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2007-08-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Railroading in its heyday

Download or read book Railroads in the Old South written by Aaron W. Marrs and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-03-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aaron W. Marrs challenges the accepted understanding of economic and industrial growth in antebellum America with this original study of the history of the railroad in the Old South. Drawing from both familiar and overlooked sources, such as the personal diaries of Southern travelers, papers and letters from civil engineers, corporate records, and contemporary newspaper accounts, Marrs skillfully expands on the conventional business histories that have characterized scholarship in this field. He situates railroads in the fullness of antebellum life, examining how slavery, technology, labor, social convention, and the environment shaped their evolution. Far from seeing the Old South as backward and premodern, Marrs finds evidence of urban life, industry, and entrepreneurship throughout the region. But these signs of progress existed alongside efforts to preserve traditional ways of life. Railroads exemplified Southerners' pursuit of progress on their own terms: developing modern transportation while retaining a conservative social order. Railroads in the Old South demonstrates that a simple approach to the Old South fails to do justice to its complexity and contradictions. -- Dr. Owen Brown and Dr. Gale E. Gibson

Download or read book Mastered by the Clock written by Mark M. Smith and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners--particularly masters and their slaves--came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival sources, Smith demonstrates that white southern slaveholders began to incorporate this new sense of time in the 1830s. Influenced by colonial merchants' fascination with time thrift, by a long-held familiarity with urban, public time, by the transport and market revolution in the South, and by their own qualified embrace of modernity, slaveowners began to purchase timepieces in growing numbers, adopting a clock-based conception of time and attempting in turn to instill a similar consciousness in their slaves. But, forbidden to own watches themselves, slaves did not internalize this idea to the same degree as their masters, and slaveholders found themselves dependent as much on the whip as on the clock when enforcing slaves' obedience to time. Ironically, Smith shows, freedom largely consolidated the dependence of masters as well as freedpeople on the clock.

Download or read book Railroads in the Old South written by Aaron W. Marrs and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-04-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original history of the railroad in the Old South that challenges the accepted understanding of economic and industrial growth in antebellum America. Drawing from both familiar and overlooked sources, such as the personal diaries of Southern travelers, papers and letters from civil engineers, corporate records, and contemporary newspaper accounts, Aaron W. Marrs skillfully expands on the conventional business histories that have characterized scholarship in this field. He situates railroads in the fullness of antebellum life, examining how slavery, technology, labor, social convention, and the environment shaped their evolution. Far from seeing the Old South as backward and premodern, Marrs finds evidence of urban life, industry, and entrepreneurship throughout the region. But these signs of progress existed alongside efforts to preserve traditional ways of life. Railroads exemplified Southerners’ pursuit of progress on their own terms: developing modern transportation while retaining a conservative social order. Railroads in the Old South demonstrates that a simple approach to the Old South fails to do justice to its complexity and contradictions. “The time is right to bring the South into the story of the economic transformation of antebellum America. Aaron Marrs does this with force and grace in Railroads in the Old South.” —John L. Larson, Purdue University “I am hard pressed to think of another volume that better catches the overall effect railroads had on the Old South.” —Kenneth W. Noe, Auburn University “Interesting regional history . . . It is a thoughtful and instructive study that examines not only the pervasiveness of transportation but also some of the social, political, and economic consequences associated with the evolution of southern railroads.” —Choice

Download or read book The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America written by Robert H. Churchill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new interpretation of the Underground Railroad that places violence at the center of the story.

Download or read book American Railroads written by John F. Stover and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few scenes capture the American experience so eloquently as that of a lonely train chugging across the vastness of the Great Plains, or snaking through tortuous high mountain passes. Although this vision was eclipsed for a time by the rise of air travel and trucking, railroads have enjoyed a rebirth in recent years as profitable freight carriers. A fascinating account of the rise, decline, and rebirth of railroads in the United States, John F. Stover's American Railroads traces their history from the first lines that helped eastern seaports capture western markets to today's newly revitalized industry. Stover describes the growth of the railroads' monopoly, with the consequent need for state and federal regulations; relates the vital part played by the railroads during the Civil War and the two World Wars; and charts the railroads' decline due to the advent of air travel and trucking during the 1950s. In two new chapters, Stover recounts the remarkable recovery of the railroads, along with other pivotal events of the industry's recent history. During the 1960s declining passenger traffic and excessive federal regulation led to the federally-financed creation of Amtrak to revive passenger service and Conrail to provide freight service on bankrupt northeastern railroads. The real savior for the railroads, though, proved to be the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, which brought prosperity to rail freight carriers by substantially deregulating the industry. By 1995, renewed railroad freight traffic had reached nearly twice its former peak in 1944. Bringing both a seasoned eye and new insights to bear on one of the most American of industries, Stover has produced the definitive history of railroads in the United States.

Download or read book Traveling Black written by Mia Bay and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the David J. Langum Prize Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Order of the Coif Book Award Winner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the Year “This extraordinary book is a powerful addition to the history of travel segregation...Mia Bay shows that Black mobility has always been a struggle.” —Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist “In Mia Bay’s superb history of mobility and resistance, the question of literal movement becomes a way to understand the civil rights movement writ large.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times “Traveling Black is well worth the fare. Indeed, it is certain to become the new standard on this important, and too often forgotten, history.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of Stony the Road From Plessy v. Ferguson to #DrivingWhileBlack, African Americans have fought to move freely around the United States. But why this focus on Black mobility? From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, Traveling Black explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape in America and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. Mia Bay rescues forgotten stories of passengers who made it home despite being insulted, stranded, re-routed, or ignored. She shows that Black travelers never stopped challenging these humiliations, documenting a sustained fight for redress that falls outside the traditional boundaries of the civil rights movement. A riveting, character-rich account of the rise and fall of racial segregation, it reveals just how central travel restrictions were to the creation of Jim Crow laws—and why free movement has been at the heart of the quest for racial justice ever since.

Download or read book The Effects Of Southern Railroads On Interior Lines During The Civil War written by Thomas George Ziek Jr. and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of the Southern railroad system on interior lines during the Civil War and determine whether or not the South enjoyed the advantage of interior lines. The use of railroads during this conflict placed an enormous physical strain upon the limited industrial resources of the Confederacy, and a great strain upon the intellectual agility of the Confederate High Command. Based upon the evidence studied, and the time-space comparisons of both Northern and Southern railway operations, several conclusions can be drawn: the South entered the war with a rail system that was unable to meet the demands of modern war; the Confederate leadership understood the importance of the railroad and its importance to strategic operations early in the war, but were unwilling to adopt a course of action that best utilized their scarce assets; Southern railroad speeds decreased dramatically by 1863 due to the inability of Southern railroads owners to perform needed maintenance on their railroad equipment; tactical reverses on the field of battle, especially the losses of both Corinth in May of 1862 and Knoxville in September of 1863 increased the distances that re-enforcements would have to travel to fight a mobile intra-theater war; Union control, maintenance, and organization of its railway assets ensured that it would be able to move large numbers of troops at the strategic level efficiently from early 1863 to the end of the war. Based on these conclusions, the Confederacy lost the ability to shift troops on the strategic level more rapidly than the Union by 1863. This was a result of its physically weakened railroad system and military setbacks which caused Southern railroads to move forces over longer distances.

Download or read book A House Dividing written by John Majewski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparing Virginia and Pennsylvania, Majewski explains how slavery undermined the development of the southern economy.

Download or read book Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South written by Michael S. Frawley and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-05-08 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the Civil War, contemporary narratives about the American South pointed to the perceived lack of industrial development in the region to explain why the Confederacy succumbed to the Union. Even after the cliometric revolution of the 1970s, when historians first began applying statistical analysis to reexamine antebellum manufacturing output, the pervasive belief in the region’s backward-ness prompted many scholars to view slavery, not industry, as the economic engine of the South. In Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South, historian Michael S. Frawley engages a wide variety of sources—including United States census data, which many historians have underutilized when gauging economic growth in the prewar South—to show how industrial development in the region has been systematically minimized by scholars. In doing so, Frawley reconsiders factors related to industrial production in the prewar South, such as the availability of natural resources, transportation, markets, labor, and capital. He contends that the Gulf South was far more industrialized and modern than suggested by census records, economic historians like Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, and contemporary travel writers such as Frederick Law Olmsted. Frawley situates the prewar South firmly in a varied and widespread industrial context, contesting the assumption that slavery inhibited industry in the region and that this lack of economic diversity ultimately prevented the Confederacy from waging a successful war. Though southern manufacturing firms could not match the output of northern states, Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South proves that such entities had established themselves as vital forces in the southern economy on the eve of the Civil War.

Download or read book The Folly of Jim Crow written by Stephanie Cole and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the origins, application, and socio-historical implications of the Jim Crow system have been studied and debated for at least the last three-quarters of a century, nuanced understanding of this complex cultural construct is still evolving, according to Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, coeditors of The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. Indeed, they suggest, scholars may profit from a careful examination of previous assumptions and conclusions along the lines suggested by the studies in this important new collection. Based on the March 2008 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures at the University of Texas at Arlington, this forty-third volume in the prestigious series undertakes a close review of both the history and the historiography of the Jim Crow South. The studies in this collection incorporate important perspectives that have developed during the past two decades among scholars interested in gender and politics, the culture of resistance, and "the hegemonic function of ‘whiteness.’" By asking fresh questions and critically examining long-held beliefs, the new studies contained in The Folly of Jim Crow will, ironically, reinforce at least one of the key observations made in C. Vann Woodward’s landmark 1955 study: In its idiosyncratic, contradictory, and multifaceted development and application, the career of Jim Crow was, indeed, strange. Further, as these studies demonstrate—and as alluded to in the title—it is folly to attempt to locate the genesis of the South’s institutional racial segregation in any single event, era, or policy. "Instead," as W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes in his introduction to the volume, "formal segregation evolved through an untidy process of experimentation and adaptation."

Download or read book The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest written by John Hebron Moore and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Old South's Cotton Kingdom arose simultaneously in two widely separated localities, the backcountry of the South Atlantic states and the east bank of the Mississippi River. Spreading from these places of origin and later merging, the east and west branches of the upland short-staple cotton industry developed along similar lines until the Civil War.John Hebron Moore's The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770--1860 traces the evolution of cotton culture in the region bordering the Mississippi River. Moore examines the society supported by that industry, emphasizing technological changes that transformed cotton plantations into agricultural equivalents of factories and slaves into Mule-drawn equipment led to the introduction of improved methods of managing plantation slaves, and that in turn altered the nature of plantation slavery significantly.Moore focuses on Mississippi as both the pioneer cotton state of the Old Southwest and the Old South's leading producer of cotton between 1835 and 1860. Progressive planters made major contributions ot the success of the antebellum upland cotton industry, including the breeding of superior varieties of cotton, the introduction of improved farm implements and machinery, the development of effective methods of combating soil erosion, and systems for managing slaves based upon incentives rather than coercion. In addition, unlike other studies of antebellum southern agriculture, this book examines the contributions to the success of cotton industry made by steamboats and railroads, manufacturing establishments, and the urban population.

Download or read book The Racial Railroad written by Julia H. Lee and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the legacy of the train as a critical site of race in the United States Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptionalism, ingenuity, and vastness. For almost two centuries, the train has served as the literal and symbolic vehicle for American national identity, manifest destiny, and imperial ambitions. It’s no surprise, then, that the train continues to endure in depictions across literature, film, ad music. The Racial Railroad highlights the surprisingly central role that the railroad has played—and continues to play—in the formation and perception of racial identity and difference in the United States. Julia H. Lee argues that the train is frequently used as the setting for stories of race because it operates across multiple registers and scales of experience and meaning, both as an invocation of and a depository for all manner of social, historical, and political narratives. Lee demonstrates how, through legacies of racialized labor and disenfranchisement—from the Chinese American construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and the depictions of Native Americans in landscape and advertising, to the underground railroad and Jim Crow segregation—the train becomes one of the exemplary spaces through which American cultural works explore questions of racial subjectivity, community, and conflict. By considering the train through various lenses, The Racial Railroad tracks how racial formations and conflicts are constituted in significant and contradictory ways by the spaces in which they occur.

Download or read book Race Law and Society written by Ian Haney López and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race, Law and Society draws together some of the very best writing on race and racism from the law and society tradition, yet it is not intended to merely reprint the greatest hits of the past. Instead, from its introduction to its selection of articles, this anthology is designed as a 'how-to manual', a guide for scholars and students seeking templates for their own work in this important but also tricky area. Race, Law and Society pulls together leading exemplars of the sorts of social science scholarship on race, society and law that will be essential to racial progress as the world begins to travel the twenty-first century.

Download or read book South to Freedom written by Alice L Baumgartner and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico. The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historianAlice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.

Download or read book The Railroads of the Confederacy written by Robert C. Black III and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-08-25 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published by UNC Press in 1952, The Railroads of the Confederacy tells the story of the first use of railroads on a major scale in a major war. Robert Black presents a complex and fascinating tale, with the railroads of the American South playing the part of tragic hero in the Civil War: at first vigorous though immature; then overloaded, driven unmercifully, starved for iron; and eventually worn out--struggling on to inevitable destruction in the wake of Sherman's army, carrying the Confederacy down with them. With maps of all the Confederate railroads and contemporary photographs and facsimiles of such documents as railroad tickets, timetables, and soldiers' passes, the book will captivate railroad enthusiasts as well as readers interested in the Civil War.

Download or read book The Louisville Cincinnati Charleston Rail Road written by H. Roger Grant and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-17 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the grand antebellum plans to build railroads to interconnect the vast American republic, perhaps none was more ambitious than the Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston. The route was intended to link the cotton-producing South and the grain and livestock growers of the Old Northwest with traders and markets in the East, creating economic opportunities along its 700-mile length. But then came the Panic of 1837, and the project came to a halt. H. Roger Grant tells the incredible story of this singular example of "railroad fever" and the remarkable visionaries whose hopes for connecting North and South would require more than half a century—and one Civil War—to reach fruition.