Contributions by Whitney Jordan Adams, Wendy Atkins-Sayre, Jason Edward Black, Patricia G. Davis, Cassidy D. Ellis, Megan Fitzmaurice, Michael L. Forst, Jeremy R. Grossman, Cynthia P. King, Julia M. Medhurst, Ryan Neville-Shepard, Jonathan M. Smith, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Dave Tell, and Carolyn Walcott Southern rhetoric is communication’s oldest regional study. During its initial invention, the discipline was founded to justify the study of rhetoric in a field of white male scholars analyzing significant speeches by other white men, yielding research that added to myths of Lost Cause ideology and a uniquely oratorical culture. Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric takes on the much-overdue task of reconstructing the way southern rhetoric has been viewed and critiqued within the communication discipline. The collection reveals that southern rhetoric is fluid and migrates beyond geography, is constructed in weak counterpublic formation against legitimated power, creates a region that is not monolithic, and warrants activism and healing. Contributors to the volume examine such topics as political campaign strategies, memorial and museum experiences, television and music influences, commemoration protests, and ethnographic experiences in the South. The essays cohesively illustrate southern identity as manifested in various contexts and ways, considering what it means to be a part of a region riddled with slavery, Jim Crow laws, and other expressions of racial and cultural hierarchy. Ultimately, the volume initiates a new conversation, asking what southern rhetorical critique would be like if it included the richness of the southern culture from which it came.

Contributions by Whitney Jordan Adams, Wendy Atkins-Sayre, Jason Edward Black, Patricia G. Davis, Cassidy D. Ellis, Megan Fitzmaurice, Michael L. Forst, Jeremy R. Grossman, Cynthia P. King, Julia M. Medhurst, Ryan Neville-Shepard, Jonathan M. Smith, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Dave Tell, and Carolyn Walcott Southern rhetoric is communication’s oldest regional study. During its initial invention, the discipline was founded to justify the study of rhetoric in a field of white male scholars analyzing significant speeches by other white men, yielding research that added to myths of Lost Cause ideology and a uniquely oratorical culture. Reconstructing Southern Rhetoric takes on the much-overdue task of reconstructing the way southern rhetoric has been viewed and critiqued within the communication discipline. The collection reveals that southern rhetoric is fluid and migrates beyond geography, is constructed in weak counterpublic formation against legitimated power, creates a region that is not monolithic, and warrants activism and healing. Contributors to the volume examine such topics as political campaign strategies, memorial and museum experiences, television and music influences, commemoration protests, and ethnographic experiences in the South. The essays cohesively illustrate southern identity as manifested in various contexts and ways, considering what it means to be a part of a region riddled with slavery, Jim Crow laws, and other expressions of racial and cultural hierarchy. Ultimately, the volume initiates a new conversation, asking what southern rhetorical critique would be like if it included the richness of the southern culture from which it came.

The only comprehensive bibliography on Reconstruction, this book provides the definitive guide to literature published from 1877 to 1998. In over 2,900 entries, the work covers a broad range of topics including politics, agriculture, labor, religion, education, race relations, law, family, gender studies, and local history. It encompasses the years of the Civil War through the conclusion of the 1876 election and the end of the federal government's official role in reforming the postwar South and protecting the rights of Black citizens. In detailed annotations, the book covers a range of literature from scholarly and popular studies to published memoirs, letters and documents, as well as reference sources and teaching tools. The issues of Reconstruction—civil rights, states' rights and federal-state relations, racism, nationalism, government aid to individuals—continue to be relevant today, and the literature on Reconstruction is large. This book provides a systematic and comprehensive bibliographic guide to that literature. It is organized by topics and geographical regions and states, thereby emphasizing the local diversity in the South. In addition to a variety of literature, it covers the relevant Supreme Court cases through 1883, provides full citations to federal acts and cases cited, and includes the texts of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The book will be useful to scholars and students researching a wide range of topics in Southern history, constitutional history, and national politics in post Civil War United States.

In the decade that followed the Civil War, two questions dominated political debate: To what degree were African Americans now “equal” to white Americans, and how should this equality be implemented in law? Although Republicans entertained multiple, even contradictory, answers to these questions, the party committed itself to several civil rights initiatives. When Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment, it justified these decisions with a broad egalitarian rhetoric. This rhetoric altered congressional culture, instituting new norms that made equality not merely an ideal,but rather a pragmatic aim for political judgments. Kirt Wilson examines Reconstruction’s desegregation debate to explain how it represented an important movement in the evolution of U.S. race relations. He outlines how Congress fought to control the scope of black civil rights by contesting the definition of black equality, and the expediency and constitutionality of desegregation. Wilson explores how the debate over desegregation altered public memory about slavery and the Civil War, while simultaneously shaping a political culture that established the trajectory of race relations into the next century.

Of the 174 delegates to the Texas convention on secession in 1861, only 8 voted against the motion to secede. James Webb Throckmorton of McKinney was one of them. Yet upon the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined the Confederate Army and fought in a number of campaigns. At war?s end, his centrist position as a conservative Unionist ultimately won him election as governor. Still, his refusal to support the Fourteenth Amendment or to protect aggressively the rights and physical welfare of the freed slaves led to clashes with military officials and his removal from office in 1867. Throckmorton?s experiences reveal much about southern society and highlight the complexities of politics in Texas during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Because his life spans one of the most turbulent periods in Texas politics, Texas Confederate, Reconstruction Governor, the first book on Throckmorton in nearly seventy years, will provide new insights for anyone interested in the Antebellum era, the Civil War, and the troubled years of Reconstruction.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of the twenty years of Reconstruction from the point of view of newly liberated African Americans. Though lambasted by critics at the time of its publication in 1935, Black Reconstruction has only grown in historical and literary importance. In the 1960s it joined the canon of the most influential revisionist historical works. Its greatest achievement is weaving a credible, lyrical historical narrative of the hostile and politically fraught years of 1860-1880 with a powerful critical analysis of the harmful effects of democracy, including Jim Crow laws and other injustices. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by David Levering Lewis, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction addresses the key topics and themes of the Civil War era, with 23 original essays by top scholars in the field. An authoritative volume that surveys the history and historiography of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction Analyzes the major sources and the most influential books and articles in the field Includes discussions on scholarly advances in U.S. Civil War history.

Brooks Simpson examines the policies of each administration in depth and evaluates them in terms of their political, social, and institutional contexts. Simpson explains what was politically possible at a time when federal authority and presidential power were more limited than they are now. He compares these four leaders' handling of similar challenges - such as the retention of political support and the need to build a southern base for their policies - in different ways and under different circumstances, and he discusses both their use of executive power and the impact of their personal beliefs on their actions.

A journey through Southern Appalachia to explore the complex messages food communicates about the region Depictions of Appalachian food culture and practices often romanticize people in the region as good, simple, and, often, white. These stereotypes are harmful to the actual people they are meant to describe as well as to those they exclude. In Hungry Roots: How Food Communicates Appalachia's Search for Resilience, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes and Wendy Atkins-Sayre tell a more complicated story. The authors embark on a cultural tour through food and drinking establishments to investigate regional resilience in and through the plurality of traditions and communities that form the foodways of Southern Appalachia.