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Many Excellent People examines the nature of North Carolina's social system, particularly race and class relations, power, and inequality, during the last half of the nineteenth century. Paul Escott portrays North Carolina's major social groups, focusing on the elite, the ordinary white farmers or workers, and the blacks, and analyzes their attitudes, social structure, and power relationships. Quoting frequently from a remarkable array of letters, journals, diaries, and other primary sources, he shows vividly the impact of the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Populism, and the rise of the New South industrialism on southern society. Working within the new social history and using detailed analyses of five representative counties, wartime violence, Ku Klux Klan membership, stock-law legislation, and textile mill records, Escott reaches telling conclusions on the interplay of race, class, and politics. Despite fundamental political and economic reforms, Escott argues, North Carolina's social system remained as hierarchical and undemocratic in 1900 as it had been in 1850.
Slavery Remembered is the first major attempt to analyze the slave narratives gathered as part of the Federal Writers' Project. Paul Escott's sensitive examination of each of the nearly 2,400 narratives and his quantitative analysis of the narratives as a whole eloquently present the differing beliefs and experiences of masters and slaves. The book describes slave attitudes and actions; slave-master relationships; the conditions of slave life, including diet, physical treatment, working conditions, housing, forms of resistance, and black overseers; slave cultural institutions; status distinctions among slaves; experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction; and the subsequent life histories of the former slaves. An important contribution to the study of American slavery, Slavery Remembered is an ideal classroom text for American history surveys as well as more specialized courses.
Throughout the Civil War, newspaper headlines and stories repeatedly asked some variation of the question posed by the New York Times in 1862, "What shall we do with the negro?" The future status of African Americans was a pressing issue for those in both the North and in the South. Consulting a broad range of contemporary newspapers, magazines, books, army records, government documents, publications of citizens’ organizations, letters, diaries, and other sources, Paul D. Escott examines the attitudes and actions of Northerners and Southerners regarding the future of African Americans after the end of slavery. "What Shall We Do with the Negro?" demonstrates how historians together with our...
The secession of the southern states from the Union was not merely a culmination of certain events; it was also the beginning of the trial of Confederate nationalism. The slaveholding elite which had led the South out of the Union now had to solidify its support among the nonslaveholding small farmers, a class that constituted the bulk of the white population.But Jefferson Davis and the new government were greatly hampered in their bid for widespread public support, partially because of the same force that had resulted in secession -- the strong states' rights predisposition of many southerners and their opposition to a strong central government -- and partially because of the great social a...
"First published in 1992, it traced the story of black North Carolinians from the colonial period into the 1990s. A revised edition issued in 2002 that included a new chapter examining the expanding political influence of North Carolina's African Americans and the rise of effective black politicians. This new, second revised edition brings the discussion through the historic presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008"--Page 4 of cover
Arguably, no event since the American Revolution has had a greater impact on US history than the Civil War. This devastating and formative conflict occupies a permanent place in the nation's psyche and continues to shape race relations, economic development, and regional politics. Naturally, an event of such significance has attracted much attention from historians, and tens of thousands of books have been published on the subject. Despite this breadth of study, new perspectives and tools are opening up fresh avenues of inquiry into this seminal era. In this timely and thoughtful book, Paul D. Escott surveys the current state of Civil War studies and explores the latest developments in resea...
Analyzes the narratives of former slaves to determine their attitudes about plantation life, Black culture, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction
Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership—territorial, economic, political, and cultural—provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic. In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global o...
V. 1, Adam-Curr -- V. 2, Dahl-Loma -- V. 3, Long-Shil -- V. 4, Shin-Zall.
This collection of thirteen essays examines the leaders of the southern states during the Civil War. Malcolm C. McMillan writes of the futile efforts of Alabama's wealthy governors to keep the trust of the poor non-slaveholding whites. Paul D. Escott shows Georgia Governor Joseph Emerson Brown's ability to please both the planter elite and the yeoman farmers. John B. Edmunds, Jr. examines the tremendous problems faced by the governors of South Carolina, the state that would suffer the highest losses. Each of the contributors describes the governor's reaction to undertaking duties never before required of men in their positions—urging men to battle, searching for means to feed and clothe the poor, boosting morale, and defending their state's territories, even against great odds.