Southern Agriculture During the Civil War Era, 1860-1880


Book Description

This is the first book to assess the contribution of Southern agriculture to the Confederate war effort, to describe the damage that agriculture sustained during the war, to analyze the transition from slavery to free labor after the war, and to recount the slow and painful process of rebuilding Southern agriculture by 1880. Synthesizing primary and secondary historical sources, Southern Agriculture During the Civil War Era, 1860-1880 fills a crucial gap in our knowledge about the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction period.




The Cause of the South


Book Description

"A forum for the South the New Orleans-based periodical De Bow's Review was one of the best-known and most influential voices of southern interests, hopes, and fears. During the more than two decades of it existence, the Review established itself as an indispensable source of fact and articulate opinion in the South. In The Cause of the South, the authors have assembled a representative selection of articles from De Bow's Review that, taken together, provide a vivid portrait of the intellectual currents that ran through the South in the tense years leading to, during, and immediately following the Civil War. De Bow founded his journal to provide a forum for the South's unique agricultural and economic interests, but in the politically volatile decade of the 1850s it was not long before the magazine took up the issues and the cause of southern nationalism and proslavery apologetics. When the South firmly, but reluctantly, moved toward secession, the Review remained in the thick of the debate, ever watchful over the region's interests. The Cause of the South is the first volume to make readily available a cross section of the contents of De Bow's Review--thus revealing the range and the quality of southern thought during more than twenty years of constant concern over the region's future. -- Amazon.com.




The Old South's Modern Worlds


Book Description

The Old South has traditionally been portrayed as an insular and backward-looking society. The Old South's Modern Worlds looks beyond this myth to identify some of the many ways that antebellum southerners were enmeshed in the modernizing trends of their time. The essays gathered in this volume not only tell unexpected narratives of the Old South, they also explore the compatibility of slavery-the defining feature of antebellum southern life-with cultural and material markers of modernity such as moral reform, cities, and industry. Considered as proponents of American manifest destiny, for example, antebellum southern politicians look more like nationalists and less like separatists. Though situated within distinct communities, Southerners'-white, black, and red-participated in and responded to movements global in scope and transformative in effect. The turmoil that changes in Asian and European agriculture wrought among southern staple producers shows the interconnections between seemingly isolated southern farms and markets in distant lands. Deprovincializing the antebellum South, The Old South's Modern Worlds illuminates a diverse region both shaped by and contributing to the complex transformations of the nineteenth-century world.







The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848-1861


Book Description




The Idea of a Southern Nation


Book Description




Shifting Grounds


Book Description

The American Civil War brought with it a crisis of nationalism. This text reinterprets southern conceptions of allegiance, identity, and citizenship within the contexts of antebellum American national identity and the transatlantic 'Age of Nationalism.'




The Southern Nation


Book Description

The definitive primer on Southern nationalism. The South has a right to nationhood, separate from the rest of the United States.This book explores how to preserve the social, religious, political, and cultural traditions of the Southern people.




Modernizing a Slave Economy


Book Description

What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? In fact, this was something that southern secessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the Confederacy. The traditional view assumes that Confederate slave-based agrarianism went hand in hand with a natural hostility toward industry and commerce. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, John Majewski's analysis finds that secessionists strongly believed in industrial development and state-led modernization. They blamed the South's lack of development on Union policies of discriminatory taxes on southern commerce and unfair subsidies for northern industry. Majewski argues that Confederates' opposition to a strong central government was politically tied to their struggle against northern legislative dominance. Once the Confederacy was formed, those who had advocated states' rights in the national legislature in order to defend against northern political dominance quickly came to support centralized power and a strong executive for war making and nation building.