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These essays introduce the complexities of researching and analyzing race. This book focuses on problems confronted while researching, writing and interpreting race and slavery, such as conflict between ideological perspectives, and changing interpretations of the questions.
In this thoughtful, sophisticated book, John B. Boles and Bethany L. Johnson piece together the intricate story of historian C. Vann Woodward’s 1951 masterpiece, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913, published as Volume IX of LSU Press’s venerable series A History of the South. Sixteen reviews and articles by prominent southern historians of the past fifty years here offer close consideration of the creation, reception, and enduring influence of that classic work of history. It is rare for an academic book to dominate its field half a century later as Woodward’s Origins does southern history. Although its explanations are not accepted by all, the volume remains the starting point for ...
From the late nineteenth century until World War I, a group of Columbia University students gathered under the mentorship of the renowned historian William Archibald Dunning (1857--1922). Known as the Dunning School, these students wrote the first generation of state studies on the Reconstruction -- volumes that generally sympathized with white southerners, interpreted radical Reconstruction as a mean-spirited usurpation of federal power, and cast the Republican Party as a coalition of carpetbaggers, freedmen, scalawags, and former Unionists. Edited by the award-winning historian John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, The Dunning School focuses on this controversial group of historians and ...
This collection of essays examines the contributions of some of the most notable interpreters of American southern history and culture. The volume includes 18 chapters on such notable historians as John Hope Franklin, Anne Firor Scott and W.J. Cash.
In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia. This innovative book uses Crowe’s paintings to explore the texture of the slave trade in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, the evolving iconography of abolitionist art, and the role of visual culture in the transatlantic world of abolitionism. Tracing Crowe’s trajectory from Richmond across the American South and back to London—where his paintings were exhibited just a few weeks after the start of the Civil War—Maurie D. McInnis illuminates not only how his abolitionist art was inspired and made, but also how it influenced the international public’s grasp of slavery in America. With almost 140 illustrations, Slaves Waiting for Sale brings a fresh perspective to the American slave trade and abolitionism as we enter the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.
Robert H. Gudmestad provides an in-depth examination of the growth and development of the interstate slave trade during the early nineteenth century, using the business as a means to explore economic change, the culture of honor, master-slave relationships, and the justification of slavery in the antebellum South. Gudmestad demonstrates how southerners, faced with the incongruity of maintaining their paternalistic beliefs about slavery even while capitalistically exploiting their slaves, coped by disassociating themselves from the brutality and greed of the slave trade and shifting responsibility for slavery’s realities to the speculators. In tracing the trans- formation of a troublesome commerce into a southern scapegoat, this pro- vocative work proves the interstate slave trade to be vital to the making—and understanding—of the paradoxical antebellum South.