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.

Synthesizing exceptional cartography and impeccable scholarship, this edition traces 12,000 years of history with 450 maps and over 200,000 words of text. 200 illustrations.

"... a very welcome addition to the literature on labour history." --Labour History Review "This is a valuable collection of essays which gives fresh perspectives and interesting empirical data on the modes of labor bargaining by New World slaves and on the transition from 'chattel' to 'wage' slavery." --New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids "Of uniformly high quality, these essays underline the fluidity and dynamic of bargaining processes, the diversity of political and economic contexts, and the importance of external factors.... will provoke discussion on parallels between capitalist agriculture and capitalist industrial organization, and will fuel debates on slave as proletarian, and on the notions of 'peasant breach' and the two economies." --Choice "[These essays] provide important answers to questions relating to levels of slave subsistence, the material conditions of the enslaved, the control mechanisms of owners, the contexts which generated labor bargaining on the part of the enslaved and the reasons owners/employers acquiesced to laborers' demands rather than rely on the coercive power of the whip." --Labor History "[The] contributors deserve commendation for making salutary advances towards developing an integrated analysis of the history of labouring people in slavery and freedom that transcends the particularities of their legal status." --Slavery & Abolition "... this collection addresses an important topic and will serve as a valuable resource for scholars and students of comparative slavery in the Americas." --Judy Bieber, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque The status of labor during slavery and post-emancipation in the Caribbean and the Americas. Contributors investigate the terms under which slaves in the Caribbean, the Southern States, and Latin America worked and how they struggled to establish informal contract terms.

Richard M. Weaver was one of the founders of modern conservatism and an enduring intellectual figure of twentieth-century America. He was dedicated to examining the dual nature of human beings and the quest for civilized communities in a corrupted age that believed in the religion of science and in the "natural goodness" of man. Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences sowed the seeds for the traditionalist wing of modern American conservatism. On the brink of the twenty-first century, the triumph of science and technology looms larger than ever. Weaver's prophetic writings on post-World War II Western decline and his visionary talents, however bleak, can easily extend into many facets of modern life: high divorce rates, a declining standard of living, the dehumanizing aspects of a corporate economy, and the destruction of civil communities. Barbarians in the Saddle is Joseph Scotchie's intellectual biography of Richard M. Weaver. It is an in-depth study of each of Weaver's published works and an examination of the significant influence he had on the formation of conservative America. Ideas Have Consequences and Visions of Order examine the problem of life in "megalopolis" where the best of everything is promised to the restless masses by their leaders and a cradle-to-grave social security state results in dangerous levels of decadence, resentment, and the loss of civility and culture. In The Southern Tradition at Bay and other essays on the American South, Weaver expresses his preference for the nonmaterialistic, virtuous ethos of the Old South. Finally, The Ethics of Rhetoric highlights Weaver's devotion to a discipline increasingly out of favor with academia. Thirty years after his untimely death, Richard Weaver remains a heroic figure to many concerned about the state of American culture and its alienated, rootless conditions. Now a new generation of leaders can understand the importance of this pioneer of thought. Barbarians in the Saddle will be of significant value to political theorists, philosophers, and students of American civilization.

This probing collection of essays assesses the wide influence of W. J. Cash and the profound effect of his classic dissection of southern history. Perhaps more than any other historian, W. J. Cash revolutionized the interpretation of southern identity. In 1941, when he published The Mind of the South, he exploded the correlated myths of the Cavalier South and the New South and gave historiography a new gauge for examining Dixie. In the half century since its publication, Cash's book has lain in the path of every historian of the South. Not all, however, have expressed unified opinions about him and his influence, though few can deny how in the past fifty years his indelible and authoritative work has shaped the writing of southern history. In "The Mind of the South": Fifty Years Later eleven scholars examine this classic study and assess its enduring importance. Bruce Clayton begins by discussing the biography of Cash and tracing his sources. In the subsequent five essays Cash is praised, evaluated, criticized, defended, classified, and acknowledged to be the lion in the crossroads of southern historiography.

This pioneering book explores the implications of postmodernism for the black community through an analysis of the civil rights and neighborhood movements in Birmingham, Alabama. Grounded not only in class struggle, the Civil Rights Movement was tied to the politics of racial identity, the neighborhood movement to the politics of place identity. Bobby M. Wilson critically examines these two movements, which together transformed race and place in Birmingham. He shows that although the civil rights struggle and neighborhood empowerment served a valuable purpose, they cannot now overcome post-Fordist forces of domination and exclusion. Successful political movements, the author argues, must venture beyond the politics of identity and difference based on race and neighborhood.

In its early years, the American Republic was far from stable. Conflict and violence, including major land wars, were defining features of the period from the Revolution to the outbreak of the Civil War, as struggles over who would control land and labor were waged across the North American continent. The World of the Revolutionary American Republic brings together original essays from an array of scholars to illuminate the issues that made this era so contested. Drawing on the latest research, the essays examine the conflicts that occurred both within the Republic and between the different peoples inhabiting the continent. Covering issues including slavery, westward expansion, the impact of Revolutionary ideals, and the economy, this collection provides a diverse range of insights into the turbulent era in which the United States emerged as a nation. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, both American and international, The World of the Revolutionary American Republic is an important resource for any scholar of early America.

A collection of scholarly essays exploring the American Civil War from international perspectives. In an attempt to counter the insular narratives of much of the sesquicentennial commemorations of the Civil War in the United States, editors David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis present this collection of essays that examine the war as more than a North American conflict, one with transnational concerns. The book, while addressing the origins of the Civil War, places the struggle over slavery and sovereignty in the United States in the context of other conflicts in the Western hemisphere. Additionally, Gleeson and Lewis offer an analysis of the impact of the war and its results overseas. Although the Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in US history and arguably its single most defining event, this work underscores the reality that the war was by no means the only conflict that ensnared the global imperial powers in the mid-nineteenth century. In some ways the Civil War was just another part of contemporary conflicts over the definitions of liberty, democracy, and nationhood. The editors have successfully linked numerous provocative themes and convergences of time and space to make the work both coherent and cogent. Subjects include such disparate topics as Florence Nightingale, Gone with the Wind, war crimes and racial violence, and choices of allegiance made by immigrants to the United States. While we now take for granted the nation’s values of freedom and democracy, we cannot understand the impact of the Civil War and the victorious “new birth of freedom” without thinking globally. The contributors to The Civil War as Global Conflict reveal that Civil War-era attitudes toward citizenship and democracy were far from fixed or stable. Race, ethnicity, nationhood, and slavery were subjects of fierce controversy. Examining the Civil War in a global context requires us to see the conflict as a seminal event in the continuous struggles of people to achieve liberty and fulfill the potential of human freedom. The book concludes with a coda that reconnects the global with the local and provides ways for Americans to discuss the war and its legacy more productively. Contributors: O. Vernon Burton; Edmund L. Drago; Hugh Dubrulle; Niels Eichhorn; W. Eric Emerson; Amanda Foreman; David T. Gleeson; Matthew Karp; Simon Lewis; Aaron W. Marrs; Lesley Marx; Joseph McGill; James M. McPherson; Alexander Noonan; Theodore N. Rosengarten; Edward B. Rugemer; Jane E. Schultz; Aaron Sheehan-Dean; Christopher Wilkins “The writers of this collection effectively balance local and global contexts to produce a significant text that is invaluable to any scholar interested in research desiring to move away from ‘pantomime-like North-South, black-white, blue-gray binaries.’” —Jesse Tyler Lobbs, Kansas State University