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Poems unearthing the strata of human conflict and hope burried across time and place

The history of African Americans in South Carolina after Reconstruction and before Jim CrowFirst published in 1952, South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900 rediscovers a time and a people nearly erased from public memory. In this pathbreaking book, George B. Tindall turns to the period after Reconstruction before a tide of reaction imposed a new system of controls on the black population of the state. He examines the progress and achievements, along with the frustrations, of South Carolina's African Americans in politics, education, labor, and various aspects of social life during the short decades before segregation became the law and custom of the land. Chronicling the evolution of Jim Crow white supremacy, the book originally appeared on the eve of the Civil Rights movement when the nation's system of disfranchisement, segregation, and economic oppression was coming under increasing criticism and attack.Along with Vernon L. Wharton's The Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890 (1947) which also shed new light on the period after Reconstruction, Tindall's treatise served as an important source for C. Vann Woodward's influential The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). South Carolina Negroes now reappears fifty years later in an environment of reaction against the Civil Rights movement, a a situation that parallels in many ways the reaction against Reconstruction a century earlier. A new introduction by Tindall reviews the book's origins and its place in the literature of Southern and black history.

This volume, first published in 1971, has made us look again at the events surrounding the Civil War. The Confederate Southerners likened themselves to the American revolutionaries of 1776. Although both revolutions sought independence and the overthrow of an existing political system, the Confederates battled for a political separation to conserve rather than to create. The result, however, was a transformation of the antebellum traditions they were fighting to preserve.

First published by the University of South Carolina in 1952, Ersatz in the Confederacy remains the definitive study of the South's desperate struggle to overcome critical shortages of food, medicine, clothing, household goods, farming supplies, and tools during the Civil War.Mary Elizabeth Massey's seminal work carefully documents the ingenuity of the Confederates as they coped with shortages of manufactured goods and essential commodities-including grain, coffee, sugar, and butter-that previously had been imported from the northern states or from England. Creative Southerners substituted sawdust for soap, pigs' tails and ears for Christmas tree ornaments, leaves for mattress stuffing, okra seeds for coffee beans, and gourds for cups. Women made clothing from scraps of material, blankets from carpets, shoes from leather saddles and furniture, and battle flags from wedding dresses.Despite the Confederates' penchant for "e;making do"e; and "e;doing without,"e; Massey's research reveals the devastating impact of war's shortages on the South's civilian population. Overly optimistic that they could easily transform a rural economy into a self-sufficient manufacturing power, Southerners suffered from both disappointment and hardship as it became clear that their expectations were unrealistic. Ersatz in the Confederacy's lasting significance lies in Masseys clearly documented conclusion that despite the resourcefulness of the Southern people, the Confederate cause was lost not at Gettysburg nor in any other military engagement but much earlier and more decisively in the homefront battle against scarcity and deprivation.

In 1904 William Garrott Brown traveled the American South, investigating the region's political, economic, and social conditions. Using the pen name "e;Stanton,"e; Brown published twenty epistles in the Boston Evening Transcript detailing his observations. The South at Work is a compilation of these newspaper articles, providing a valuable snapshot of the South as it was simultaneously emerging from post-Civil War economic depression and imposing on African Americans the panoply of Jim Crow laws and customs that sought to exclude them from all but the lowest rungs of southern society. A Harvard-educated historian and journalist originally from Alabama, Brown had been commissioned by the Evening Transcript to visit a wide range of locations and to chronicle the region with a greater depth than that of typical travelers' accounts. Some articles featured familiar topics such as a tobacco warehouse in Durham, North Carolina; a textile mill in Columbia, South Carolina; and the vast steel mills at Birmingham. However, Brown also covered atypical enterprises such as citrus farming in Florida, the King Ranch in Texas, and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. To add perspective, he talked to businessmen and politicians, as well as everyday workers. In addition to describing the importance of diversifying the South's agricultural economy beyond cotton, Brown addressed race relations and the role of politicians such as James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, the growth of African American communities such as Hayti in Durham, and the role universities played in changing the intellectual climate of the South. The editor, Bruce E. Baker, has written an introduction and provided thorough annotations for each of Brown's letters. Baker demonstrates the value of the collection as it touches on racism, moderate progressivism, and accommodation with the political status quo in the South. Baker and Brown's combined work makes The South at Work one of the most detailed and interesting portraits of the region at the beginning of the twentieth century. Publication in book form makes The South at Work conveniently available to students and scholars of modern southern and American history.

A rare classic in American social science, Edgar Thompson's 1932 University of Chicago dissertation, "e;The Plantation,"e; broke new analytic ground in the study of the southern plantation system. Thompson refuted long-espoused climatic theories of the origins of plantation societies and offered instead a richly nuanced understanding of the links between plantation culture, the global history of capitalism, and the political and economic contexts of hierarchical social classification. This first complete publication of Thompson's study makes available to modern readers one of the earliest attempts to reinterpret the history of the American South as an integral part of global processes. In this Southern Classics edition, editors Sidney W. Minz and George Baca provide a thorough introduction explicating Thompson's guiding principles and grounding his germinal work in its historical context. Thompson viewed the plantation as a political institution in which the quasi-industrial production of agricultural staples abroad through race-making labor systems solidified and advanced European state power. His interpretation marks a turning point in the scientific study of an ancient agricultural institution, in which the plantation is seen as a pioneering instrument for the expansion of the global economy. Further, his awareness of the far-reaching history of economic globalization and of the conception of race as socially constructed predicts viewpoints that have since become standard. As such, this overlooked gem in American intellectual history is still deeply relevant for ongoing research and debate in social, economic, and political history.

Reprinted for the first time in more than forty years this memoir offers a candid look into the daily life of a Low Country South Carolina family, as well as commentary and opinion about such matters as rice cultivation, slavery, and the sporting life. In the SOUTHERN CLASSICS series.

Alexander McGillivray (1750-1793), the son of a Scottish Indian trader and a Muskogee Creek woman, was educated in Charleston, South Carolina, and took up mantle of negotiator for Creek people during and after the Revolution. This work provides an Indian perspective into Creek diplomatic negotiations with Americans and Spanish.

A celebrated social history, this work represents the culmination of three decades of research and reflection on the social and economic systems of the antebellum South by a leading historian of the first half of the twentieth century. It includes an introduction that frames the volume within Progressive Era scholarship.

This study stands as an institutional and political history of South Carolina's secession and governance during the Civil War. This edition features an introduction by J Tracy Power summarizing the political climate that characterized South Carolina's departure from the Union and entrance into war, and examining the significance of this book.

This is the story of an ill-fated marriage on the eve of World War II. When ""Tat"" elopes with the henna-haired daughter of the Hessenwinkles, his family, the Redcliffs are determined to respond with civility. They invite their son, his new wife and her family for Sunday dinner at three o'clock.

This look at the Confederate experience of soldiers, African Americans, and women sparked a debate about the reasons for southern defeat when it was first published in 1944. It challenges southern myths about a contented and loyal slave population, and questions popular morale.

First published in 1928, this text explores the Huguenot presence in the South Carolina colonies. The author provides description and analysis of the migration and settlement there, showing how communities and churches were founded and how religious, political and social integration occurred.

Using conscription to illustrate a central paradox of the Confederacy, this work examines the system's daily operations, troublesome substitution, and exemption procedures, and ultimate collapse. William Garrett Piston's introduction places the volume in its historical context.

First published in 1931, the author exposes the commercial aspects of slave trading, including the ""breeding"" and ""rearing"" of slaves for sale to Western territories. The author shows antebellum slavery to be commercial, exploitative and cruel rather than a benevolent ""peculiar institution

A self-portrait of an admirable plantation mistress spanning a period from antebellum days until World War I.

A champion of state rights, he is an important figure in the drama of expansion and conflict that is at the heart of American history in the nineteenth-century.

A revealing account of Reconstruction by a Wisconsin carpetbagger and devout abolitionist who moved to Mississippi in pursuit of wealth and social reform. In 1884, Albert T. Morgan published ""Yazoo"" to explain the difficulties he and his compatriots faced in the South.

Collects some of the Southern humorist's best writings from the Civil War and Reconstruction era.

Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918) accomplished a political revolution in South Carolina when he defeated Governor Wade Hampton and the old guard Bourbons who had run the state since the end of reconstruction. This work is his biography.

John E. Cairnes's seminal work on slavery was widely acclaimed upon its publication in 1862 as a brilliant attempt both to explain the essential cause of the American Civil War and to shape European policy concerning the struggle.

A path-breaking study of slavery in Mississippi from 1933 contributes to the ongoing debate

Consisting of ""Blackways of Kent"" (1955), ""Millways of Kent"" (1958), and ""Townways of Kent"", the ""Kent Trilogy"" forms a southern ethnography. This text presents an account of African American life in a small Southern town just prior to the Civil Rights era. It includes a preface on the origins and impact of the ""Kent Trilogy"".

Provides an account of a bomb factory's impact on small town life in South Carolina. This title recounts the displacement of the residents of Ellenton, South Carolina, in the early 1950s to make way for the Savannah River Plant, a critical cold-war nuclear weapons facility.

Recognized since its publication in 1926 as a watershed in American historiography, Craven's study of soil depletion in Virginia and Maryland links elements of the author's frontier thesis, causal aspects of the expansion of slavery, and the economics of staple-crop production.

Published in Richmond, Virginia, ""The Southern Literary Messenger"" was originally edited by Edgar Allan Poe. In 1905, Benjamin Blake Minor wrote a study of this magazine. This book presents Minor's account of the journal's history, along with an introduction by Wells which places Minor's account in a historical context.

A memoir of the ambitious life and controversial political career of Louisiana governor Henry Clay Warmoth (1842-1931). It provides an account of the political and social machinations of Civil War America and the war's aftermath in one of the most volatile states of the defeated Confederacy.

A firsthand look at one of South Carolina's most influential antebellum dynasties and the institutions of slavery and plantation agriculture upon which it was built. , Robert F. W. Allston's letters, speeches, receipts, and ledger entries chronicle both the heyday of the rice industry and its precipitate crash during the Civil War.

Originally published in 1878, this novel marked the emergence of a feminist critique of southern society. It follows the romance between a free-spirited, intellectual woman and a Union soldier, and broke new ground in its representation of a wife's ""duties"" and the inclusion of black characters.

Elliott's captivating sketches preserve a bounty of natural history and locale wisdom, and just as important, they provide insight into a Southern way of life that would soon end in civil war.