Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American economy, 1865-1914 is a reinterpretation of black economic history in the half-century after Emancipation. Its central theme is that economic competition and racial coercion jointly determined the material condition of the blacks. The book identifies a number of competitive processes that played important roles in protecting blacks from the racial coercion to which they were peculiarly vulnerable. It also documents the substantial economic gains realized by the black population between 1865 and 1914. Professor Higgs's account is iconoclastic. It seeks to reorganize the present conceptualization of the period and to redirect future study of black economic history in the post-Emancipation period. It raises new questions and suggests new answers to old questions, asserting that some of the old questions are misleadingly framed or not worth pursuing at all.

Contains 2,200 entries that provide information about African-American history, arranged alphabetically, and featuring a large number of biographies, as well as information about places, events, historical eras, legal cases, cultural achievements, professions, and sports.

Identifies some 1,700 works about African Americans. Entries include full bibliographic information as well as Library of Congress call numbers and location in 11 major university libraries. Entries are arranged by subjects such as art, civil rights, folk tales, history, legal status, medicine, music, race relations, and regional studies. First published in 1970 by the Library of Congress.

This edition of the economic history classic One Kind of Freedom reprints the entire text of the first edition together with an introduction by the authors and an extensive bibliography of works in Southern history published since the appearance of the first edition. The book examines the economic institutions that replaced slavery and the conditions under which ex-slaves were allowed to enter the economic life of the United States following the Civil War. The authors contend that although the kind of freedom permitted to black Americans allowed substantial increases in their economic welfare, it effectively curtailed further black advancement and retarded Southern economic development. Quantitative data are used to describe the historical setting but also shape the authors' economic analysis and test the appropriateness of their interpretations. Ransom and Sutch's revised findings enrich the picture of the era and offer directions for future research.