HY 435: Civil War and Reconstruction: ACLS Humanities E-books

In his bold and extensively researched study of the black political traditions emerging out of slavery, Hahn continues the field's ongoing demolition of the myth of the submissive slave cowering before his master and the ignorant freedman passively waiting for his "40 acres and a mule" to fall from the sky. In their place, he offers an occasionally overstated but compelling portrait of rural Southern blacks fighting for political and economic power despite entrenched and often violent obstacles. From clan-based organization on the plantation through Reconstruction-era political party mobilization to the rise in emigrationist sentiment culminating in Garveyism in the 1920s, Hahn describes the serious groundwork that became most visible with the franchise but had formed long before the Civil War. (Publisher's Weekly)

Despite the vast changes in plantation agriculture following the Civil War and Reconstruction, the lot of small farmers was little improved. Examining the nonplantation region of upcountry Georgia as a microcosm of the South, Steven Hahn showed how farmers were buffeted by such forces as the unravelling of antebellum household economy, the development of market forces, the growth of a new class of merchants-landlords, and rising tensions between town and countryside--and how their resentments fueld the Populist movement at the end of the 19th century. For this updated edition, Hahn will add new material to discuss how the book has stood up since it was published over twenty years ago, how the arguments and questions were received, and what influence they may have had on scholarship. He will also consider what has happened to historical interest in Populism, poor white people and populist politics, as well as why he thinks it likely that interest may revive and what sort of questions and arguments may drive it. (amazon.com)

Likely to become the standard one-volume history of our Civil War, this vivifies, with palpable immediacy, scholarly acumen and interpretive skill, events foreshadowing the conflict, the war itself and its basic issue: slavery. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

After more than two decades, Origins of the New South is still recognized both as a classic in regional historiography and as the most perceptive account yet written on the period which spawned the New South.

Subject headings: Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877)
• African Americans -- Civil rights
• United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1869

An important and timely study...Nelson successfully demonstrates the substance and consistency of pre-Lochner Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence. This is a significant achievement.
--Louis S. Gerteis (American Journal of Legal History )

Improves our understanding of how the Fourteenth Amendment was able to be read so expansively...Adds enormously to our constitutional history.
--Frank J. Macchiarola (Political Science Quarterly )

Dan T. Carter's When the War Was Over is a social and political history of the two years following the surrender of the Confederacy--the so-called period of Presidential Reconstruction when the South, under the watchful gaze of Congress and the Union army, attempted to rebuild its shattered society and economic structure. Working primarily from rich manuscript sources, Carter draws a vivid portrait of the political leaders who emerged after the war, a diverse group of men--former loyalists as well as a few mildly repentant fire-eaters--who in some cases genuinely sought to find a place in southern society for the newly emancipated slaves, but who in many other cases merely sought to redesign the boundaries of black servitude. Carter finds that as a group the politicians who emerged in the post-war South failed critically in the test of their leadership. Not only were they unable to construct a realistic program for the region's recovery--a failure rooted in their stubborn refusal to accept the full consequences of emancipation--but their actions also served to exacerbate rather than allay the fears and apprehensions of the victorious North. Even so, Carter reveals, these leaders were not the monsters that many scholars have suggested they were, and it is misleading to dismiss them as racists and political incompetents. In important ways, they represented the most constructive, creative, and imaginative response that the white South, overwhelmed with defeat and social chaos, had to offer in 1865 and 1866. Out of their efforts would come the New South movement and, with it, the final downfall of the plantation system and the beginnings of social justice for the freed slaves.