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Corra Harris and the Divided Mind of the New South

Catherine Oglesby

Corra Harris (1869–1935) was one of the most widely published and nationally popular women writers in the United States. A Circuit Rider's Wife (1910) was Georgia's most celebrated novel for nearly ... More

Corra Harris (1869–1935) was one of the most widely published and nationally popular women writers in the United States. A Circuit Rider's Wife (1910) was Georgia's most celebrated novel for nearly three decades. Now little read and almost forgotten, Harris's life offers a fascinating glimpse into a world nearly unimaginable to us today. In her writing, Harris poignantly and often humorously captured the paradoxes characteristic of the New South, a time and place of radically divergent goals. Pressed by national and economic demands to modernize, and regional desire to hold on to the past, leaders struggled at the turn of the century to reconcile competing goals. Issues of race, class, and gender found in Harris's writing were at the heart of the struggle. In depicting the complexities of Harris's era, her life, and her personality, this book offers an insight into early twentieth-century literature and culture. The book demonstrates the ways Harris's work and life both differed from and were the same as other southern women writers, and reveals the ways time and place intersect with race, class, gender, and other variables in the forging of identity.Less

Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South

John Mayfield

This book is a reappraisal of Southern manhood and identity that uses humor and humorists to carry the reader into the very heart of antebellum culture. What does it mean to be a man in the pre-Civil ... More

This book is a reappraisal of Southern manhood and identity that uses humor and humorists to carry the reader into the very heart of antebellum culture. What does it mean to be a man in the pre-Civil War South? And how can we answer the question from the perspective of the early 21st century? The author does so by revealing how early 19th-century Southern humorists addressed the anxieties felt by men seeking to chart a new path between the old honor culture and the new market culture. Lacking the constraints imposed by journalism or proper literature, these writers created fictional worlds where manhood and identity could be tested and explored. Preoccupied alternately by moonlight and magnolias and racism and rape, we have continually presented ourselves with an Old South so mirthless it couldn't breathe. If all the author did was remind us that Old Southerners laughed, he would have accomplished something. But he also offers an analysis of the social functions humor performed and the social anxieties it reflected.Less

Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South

William A. Link, David Brown, Brian Ward, and Martyn Bone (eds)

This volume brings together historians and literary scholars in a discussion about the evolving concept of citizenship in the nineteenth-century South. Race, and especially slavery and emancipation, ... More

This volume brings together historians and literary scholars in a discussion about the evolving concept of citizenship in the nineteenth-century South. Race, and especially slavery and emancipation, determined much about citizenship, in large part because the South was a society with “anti-citizens”-people whose status defined them outside of the realm of citizenship. However, Civil War and Reconstruction changed things radically, redefining the meaning of citizenship and thrusting this new meaning into center stage. This volume explores various dimensions of how citizenship changed, and what it meant, using a variety of disciplines and disciplinary approaches. Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South contains eleven original essays, and an epilogue from a distinguished list of scholars.Less

Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans

Nathalie Dessens

The first half of the nineteenth century was, for New Orleans, a seminal period. Based on a voluminous correspondence, archived at The Historic New Orleans Collection, the present book draws a ... More

The first half of the nineteenth century was, for New Orleans, a seminal period. Based on a voluminous correspondence, archived at The Historic New Orleans Collection, the present book draws a chronicle of the Crescent City in the 1820s and 1830s. Starting in 1818, six years after Louisiana became a state, the 1200-page correspondence of Jean Boze, a resident of New Orleans, to Henri de Sainte-Gême, a former inhabitant of the city returned to his hometown in Southwestern France, describes at length the extraordinary changes the city underwent during the early American period. A small provincial frontier town in the early nineteenth century, it was the third largest city in the United States in 1840. Over these three decades, the city grew and modernized, taking advantage of its strategic geographical position at the mouth of the Mississippi River to become a bustling crossroads of the Atlantic World, connecting the young American Republic, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. It also welcomed, in numbers unheard of until then, new migrants from the United States, Europe, and the former colony of Saint-Domingue, which became, in 1804, the Haitian republic. These migrants changed the face of the city and established with the Creole population complex relationships that eventually shaped the original identity of the city. The book, following Boze's eyes, draws an original chronicle of one of the most unusual cities in the United States, trying to understand and explain the process that turned the city into the Creole capital.Less

The Door of Hope: Republican Presidents and the First Southern Strategy, 1877–1933

Edward O. Frantz

How did the political party of Abraham Lincoln—of emancipation—become the party of the South and of white resentment? How did Jefferson Davis's old party become the preferred choice for most southern ... More

How did the political party of Abraham Lincoln—of emancipation—become the party of the South and of white resentment? How did Jefferson Davis's old party become the preferred choice for most southern blacks? Most scholars date these transformations to the administrations of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. This book challenges this myopic view by closely examining the complex and often contradictory rhetoric and symbolism utilized by Republicans between 1877 and 1933. Presidential journeys throughout the South were public rituals that provided a platform for the issues of race, religion, and Republicanism for both white and black southerners. The book notes the common themes and questions scrutinized during this time and finely crafts comparisons between the presidents' speeches and strategies, while they debated the power dynamics that underlay their society. It brings new voices to the forefront by utilizing the rich resources of the African American press during the administrations of Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Herbert Hoover. Although these Republicans ultimately failed to build lasting coalitions in the states of the former Confederacy, their tours provided the background for future GOP victories.Less

James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War

Michael J. Birkner and John W. Quist (eds)

As James Buchanan took office in 1857 the United States stood at a crossroads. A potential Union-breaking presidential election result had been averted. The Democratic Party maintained its control of ... More

As James Buchanan took office in 1857 the United States stood at a crossroads. A potential Union-breaking presidential election result had been averted. The Democratic Party maintained its control of the federal government and the nation watched to see whether Pennsylvania’s first president could make good on his promise to calm sectional tensions. It was not to be, as Buchanan’s presidency concluded with the breakup of the Union. Because historians agree that Buchanan caused many of his own troubles, beginning with his rigidly pro-southern policy on the admission of Kansas to the Union, he has been largely relegated to the basement among inhabitants of the White House. But can anything else be said about the fifteenth president? In assembling the essays for this volume, editors John W. Quist and Michael J. Birkner asked leading scholars to revisit standard issues and explore newer ones. These essays bring Buchanan’s presidency into sharper focus. Buchanan’s dealings with Utah shed light on his handling of the secession crisis. His approach to Dred Scott reinforces the image of a president whose doughface views were less a matter of hypocrisy than a thorough identification with southern interests. Essays on the secession crisis provide fodder for debate about the strengths and limitations of presidential authority in an existential moment for the young nation. Together, these essays will contribute to a deeper understanding of a turbulent and complex era.Less

Mr. Flagler's St. Augustine

Thomas Graham

This book is a sympathetic, personal biography of Henry M. Flagler during the years after he left Standard Oil to pursue his second career as builder of Florida. This is also a narrative history of ... More

This book is a sympathetic, personal biography of Henry M. Flagler during the years after he left Standard Oil to pursue his second career as builder of Florida. This is also a narrative history of the transformation of St. Augustine, Florida, from a remote village on the Southern frontier of America into a modern city. However, the narrative expands beyond St. Augustine to follow the extension of Flagler's railroad and hotel empire down the East Coast of Florida to Palm Beach, Miami, and, ultimately, Key West. This book tells the stories of a variety of people whose lives touched Henry M. Flagler: the women who wrote guide books to promote tourism, the architects who designed his hotels, the artists who decorated the hotels, the black hotel waiters (and baseball players), the people who wrote society columns for the newspapers, employees of the hotels and railroads, Flagler's friends and relatives, and, of course, the rich and famous guests who stayed in Flagler's hotels. John D. Rockefeller makes several appearances that are not mentioned in earlier Flagler biographies. This, the first biography of Henry M. Flagler to appear in a quarter century, achieves a level of personal detail not reached in earlier books on Flagler during his Florida years. It is based upon years of research by a historian who spent his career teaching at Flagler College, which today occupies the magnificent halls of Flagler's former Hotel Ponce de Leon.Less

Nature, Business, and Community in North Carolina's Green Swamp

Tycho de Boer

This environmental history underscores the uneasy balance between conservation and commerce. By using North Carolina's Green Swamp as a case study, the book illustrates the struggle of a rural area ... More

This environmental history underscores the uneasy balance between conservation and commerce. By using North Carolina's Green Swamp as a case study, the book illustrates the struggle of a rural area trying to preserve its natural environment while encouraging economic growth. It highlights the complex relationship between the swamp, located in the extreme southeast corner of the state, local inhabitants, and outside entrepreneurs. The book traces the growth of agriculture and the turpentine and lumber industries from the mid-seventeenth century to the present, and examines their impact, including the destruction of longleaf pine forests. Yet it also reveals how businesses in this region took a leading role in managing the environment. What emerges is an understanding of the complex intersections between nature, business, and community. This is a history of a rare natural environment and its transformation that demonstrates communal values and practices individuals can mitigate—and often have mitigated—and the damage capitalist interests inflict on the world.Less

Quakers Living in the Lion's Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730-1865

A. Glenn Crothers

This book explores the experience of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in northern Virginia between the 1730s and 1865. The spiritual convictions of this religious minority, particularly the belief in ... More

This book explores the experience of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in northern Virginia between the 1730s and 1865. The spiritual convictions of this religious minority, particularly the belief in a divine spark within all people, committed them to non-violence, gendered spiritual equality, and (after the American Revolution) antislavery. These principles, along with their distinctive dress, speech, behavior, and marriage patterns, made Friends dissenters within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Virginia, where white residents embraced slavery and a violent honor code. Friends faced intensified pressure in moments of crisis-when war came to Virginia and during the deepening sectional crisis after 1830-convincing many to move the Old Northwest. Those who remained participated in the economic and civic life of this borderland southern region. Seeking to transform the region through example, they embraced free labor, agricultural improvement, economic development, and a variety of civic reforms designed to demonstrate the superiority of a free labor economy. But Friends could not escape entirely the influence of the broader society. Some became entangled in slavery or embraced southern racial attitudes, and all faced difficult questions about means and ends as they tried to effect social change. Quakers also faced internal tensions caused by migration and theological disputes that expanded the responsibilities of women in the Society. These external and internal pressures culminated during the Civil War. Out of the war emerged a transformed Quakerism, which placed less emphasis on behavioral rules and more on Friends' efforts to effect moral reform in the world.Less

Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology

Rebecca Cawood McIntyre

Less than a decade after the conclusion of the Civil War, northern promoters began pushing images of a mythic South to boost tourism. By creating a hierarchical relationship based on region and race ... More

Less than a decade after the conclusion of the Civil War, northern promoters began pushing images of a mythic South to boost tourism. By creating a hierarchical relationship based on region and race in which northerners were always superior, promoters saw tourist dollars begin flowing southward, but this cultural construction was damaging to southerners, particularly African Americans. This book focuses on the years between 1870 and 1920, a period framed by the war and the growth of automobile tourism. These years were critical in the creation of the South's modern identity, and the book reveals that tourism images created by northerners for northerners had as much effect on making the South “southern” as did the most ardent proponents of the Lost Cause. It also demonstrates how northern tourism contributed to the worsening of race relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Less

Travels on the St. Johns River

John Bartram and William Bartram

Thomas Hallock and Richard Franz (eds)

Travels on the St. Johns River presents writings by pioneering American naturalists John Bartram and William Bartram during their exploration of Florida in the second half of the eighteenth century. ... More

Travels on the St. Johns River presents writings by pioneering American naturalists John Bartram and William Bartram during their exploration of Florida in the second half of the eighteenth century. Part I (chapters one–three) includes selections from John Bartram's Diary, William Bartram's description of the St. Johns River valley in his celebrated Travels, and selected correspondence. Part II (chapter four) describes the landscapes, plants and animals, people, and cultural artifacts that John and William encountered in their explorations. Descriptions of the natural world, written in binominal nomenclature, are updated and redefined. Here, armchair and active travelers will find a guide to both the St. Johns River valley, its landscapes, its flora and fauna, and to the Bartrams' responses to the natural world of their time. Photographs, drawings, and maps accompany the writings and the editors’ modern interpretations.Less

The Triumph of the Antebellum Free Trade Movement

William S. Belko

As a result of the Tariffs of 1824 and 1828, a powerful aversion to the protectionist policies had arisen throughout the United States by the middle of President Jackson's first term. In order to ... More

As a result of the Tariffs of 1824 and 1828, a powerful aversion to the protectionist policies had arisen throughout the United States by the middle of President Jackson's first term. In order to counter the spectre of the recent tariff legislation, in the summer of 1831 communities across the country elected delegates to a national convention of anti-tariff, free trade men, which convened in Philadelphia later that fall. Some of the more recognized men steeped in political economy and some of the more recognized statesmen of the day attended the national event. The delegates brought with them disparate, often conflicting voices, and they represented various strands of anti-tariff, free trade thought. Despite these difficulties, the delegates succeeded in attaining harmony and unity, achieving a comprehensive and unified approach to end the protective system and establish free trade as the general economic policy of the United States. The Philadelphia Convention produced several public documents, which immediately became the textbook works for free traders of the day, who would go on to spearhead the anti-tariff position in the halls of Congress as the nullification crisis heated up. The ensuing political battles resulting in the Tariffs of 1832, 1833, 1842, and 1846 reflected the unification of the anti-tariff, free trade impulse as it emerged at the 1831 Convention, and which ultimately prevailed during the presidency of James Polk, lasting until the Civil War.Less

Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston

Jeff Strickland

Charleston, South Carolina, was a cosmopolitan city during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Germans, Irish, and a host of European and Latin American immigrants shared the same workplaces, ... More

Charleston, South Carolina, was a cosmopolitan city during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Germans, Irish, and a host of European and Latin American immigrants shared the same workplaces, neighborhoods, streets, residences, and even households. Charleston was a slave society, and its economy relied on the forced labor of thousands of slaves. Immigrants also worked as entrepreneurs, skilled artisans, and laborers. Immigrants and African Americans interacted on a daily basis, and their relations were often positive. White southerners found those positive relations threatening, and nativist sentiments prevailed during the 1850s. Slaveholding meant economic and political power, and although some immigrants owned slaves many found it objectionable. The Civil War presented slaveholding immigrants, and those that aspired to it, the opportunity to side with the Confederacy. While many German and Irish immigrants enlisted in the fight to preserve slavery, others avoided the conflict. Following the Civil War, German immigrants that had continued to operate their businesses during the war led efforts to rebuild the city. Reconstruction afforded German and Irish immigrants and African Americans political opportunities previously limited or denied. The majority of European immigrants supported the Democratic Party, the party of white supremacy, and African Americans chose the Republican Party.Less

The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim

Robert E. May

This collection of essays addresses the role of foreign affairs in the American Civil War. It argues that foreign relations held far more significance for the war's outcome than is generally ... More

This collection of essays addresses the role of foreign affairs in the American Civil War. It argues that foreign relations held far more significance for the war's outcome than is generally recognized. Particular emphasis is given to the policies that Union president Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward adopted to ward off European recognition of Confederate independence—including their reluctance to enforce the Monroe Doctrine—and why the South's “King Cotton” diplomacy never achieved the results that Confederate founders expected when they created their new nation. The authors probe the economic, ideological, cultural, and geopolitical factors in the Confederate failure to earn recognition from a single foreign power and why dangerous international incidents such as the “Trent affair” and the Confederate raid from Canada on St. Albans, Vermont, failed to bring about European involvement in the war. The book addresses the international complications of the Union blockade, considers the impact on British public opinion of public addresses in England by former southern slaves, assesses Union and Confederate reactions to French emperor Napoleon III's intervention in Mexico, and treats the impact abroad of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The book suggests that the war's outcome inspired liberal and reform movement all over the world and that Civil War diplomatic issues still hold relevance in modern times.Less

Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World: Slave Trader, Plantation Owner, Emancipator

Daniel L. Schafer

Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., 1765–1843, was born in England, reared in Charleston, South Carolina during the American Revolution, and moved to British New Brunswick when his merchant father was banished ... More

Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., 1765–1843, was born in England, reared in Charleston, South Carolina during the American Revolution, and moved to British New Brunswick when his merchant father was banished with other Loyalists. He became a ship captain engaged in Atlantic commerce, buying sugar and coffee in the Caribbean and slaves in Africa, and exchanging British nationality for loyalty to the United States, Denmark, and Spain to enhance his trade. Abolition of the Atlantic slave trade prompted Kingsley to become a plantation and slave owner in Spanish East Florida, and an advocate of liberal manumission policies found in Spanish laws on race and slavery. Kingsley practiced the humane and patriarchal system of labor discussed in his monograph, A Treatise on the Patriarchal. Kingsley is also remembered for his unorthodox family. Although never married, he fathered children by several enslaved women on his plantation and lived with them in coterminous relationships that lasted for decades. Anta Majigeen Njaay, Kingsley’s only acknowledged “wife,” was of royal lineage in the Kingdom of Jolof in Senegal before being captured in a slave raid. The 1821 American annexation of Florida brought severe laws regulating slavery, banning emancipation, and threatening rights and freedoms of free persons of color. Kingsley responded by purchasing thirty thousand acres of land near Puerto Plata, Haiti (now the Dominican Republic), and establishing a thriving agricultural settlement. Between 1836 and 1840, his extended family and more than fifty slaves (emancipated) moved to this refuge. Descendants still live in the area.Less