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"Southern States -- History"
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Defending White Democracy
After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, southern white backlash seemed to explode overnight. Journalists profiled the rise of a segregationist movement committed to preserving the \"southern way of life\" through a campaign of massive resistance. InDefending White Democracy, Jason Morgan Ward reconsiders the origins of this white resistance, arguing that southern conservatives began mobilizing against civil rights some years earlier, in the era before World War II, when the New Deal politics of the mid-1930s threatened the monopoly on power that whites held in the South.As Ward shows, years before \"segregationist\" became a badge of honor for civil rights opponents, many white southerners resisted racial change at every turn--launching a preemptive campaign aimed at preserving a social order that they saw as under siege. By the time of theBrowndecision, segregationists had amassed an arsenal of tested tactics and arguments to deploy against the civil rights movement in the coming battles. Connecting the racial controversies of the New Deal era to the more familiar confrontations of the 1950s and 1960s, Ward uncovers a parallel history of segregationist opposition that mirrors the new focus on the long civil rights movement and raises troubling questions about the enduring influence of segregation's defenders.
eBook
Flush Times and Fever Dreams
In 1834 Virgil Stewart rode from western Tennessee to a territory known as the \"Arkansas morass\" in pursuit of John Murrell, a thief accused of stealing two slaves. Stewart's adventure led to a sensational trial and a wildly popular published account that would ultimately help trigger widespread violence during the summer of 1835, when five men accused of being professional gamblers were hanged in Vicksburg, nearly a score of others implicated with a gang of supposed slave thieves were executed in plantation districts, and even those who tried to stop the bloodshed found themselves targeted as dangerous and subversive. Using Stewart's story as his point of entry, Joshua D. Rothman details why these events, which engulfed much of central and western Mississippi, came to pass. He also explains how the events revealed the fears, insecurities, and anxieties underpinning the cotton boom that made Mississippi the most seductive and exciting frontier in the Age of Jackson. As investors, settlers, slaves, brigands, and fortune-hunters converged in what was then America's Southwest, they created a tumultuous landscape that promised boundless opportunity and spectacular wealth. Predicated on ruthless competition, unsustainable debt, brutal exploitation, and speculative financial practices that looked a lot like gambling, this landscape also produced such profound disillusionment and conflict that it contained the seeds of its own potential destruction. Rothman sheds light on the intertwining of slavery and capitalism in the period leading up to the Panic of 1837, highlighting the deeply American impulses underpinning the evolution of the slave South and the dizzying yet unstable frenzy wrought by economic flush times. It is a story with lessons for our own day. Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.
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Slavery in Indian country : the changing face of captivity in early America
Slavery existed in North America long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown. For centuries, Native Americans took prisoners of war and killed, adopted, or enslaved them. This book takes a familiar setting for bondage, the American South, and places Native Americans at the centre of the story.
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Zamumo's Gifts
In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region. Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance of chiefdoms like Zamumo's and promoted the rise of new and powerful Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws.Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida's Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart of Zamumo's Gifts highlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be understood without each other.
eBook
Ariel's Ecology
What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, Ariel's Ecology explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert's examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings' interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare's Tempest and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws to Spivak's theories of subalternity. In Allewaert's interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara's dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with \"perfect knowledge of the ground.\"
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They were her property : white women as slave owners in the American South
\"Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America\"-- Provided by publisher.
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An Anxious Pursuit
In An Anxious Pursuit , Joyce Chaplin examines the impact
of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of
American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses
particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress,
tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia,
and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern,
improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice
as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates
the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life.
By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of
cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic
history.
Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private
papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton
cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a
modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to
improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive
anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The
basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties,
according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery.
Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of
the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower
South's ability to compete in the contemporary world.
Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some
of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues
that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the
antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a
reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an
outright rejection of those ideas.
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