Operating under an outmoded system of urban development and faced by the vicissitudes of the Civil War and Reconstruction, southerners in the nineteenth century built a network of cities that met the needs of their society. In this pioneering exploration of that intricate story, Lawrence H. Larsen shows that in the antebellum period, southern entrepreneurs built cities in layers to facilitate the movement of cotton. First came the colonial cities, followed by those of the piedmont, the New West, the Gulf Coast, and the interior. By the Civil War, cotton could move by a combination of road, rail, and river through a network of cities—for example, from Jackson to Memphis to New Orleans to Europe. In the Gilded Age, building on past practices, the South continued to make urban gains. Men like Henry Grady of Atlanta and Henry Watterson of Louisville used broader regional objectives to promote their own cities. Grady successfully sold Atlanta, one of the most southern of cities demographically, as a city with a northern outlook; Watterson tied Louisville to national goals in railroad building. The New South movement did not succeed in bringing the region to parity with the rest of the nation, yet the South continued to rise along older lines. By 1900, far from being a failure in terms of the general course of American development, the South had created an urban system suited to its needs, while avoiding the promotional frenzy that characterized the building of cities in the North. Based upon federal and local sources, this book will become the standard work on nineteenth-century southern urbanization, a subject too long unexplored.

More than simply providing a regional history of one of the most important Pan-African movements of the twentieth century, this book demonstrates the ways in which racial, class, and spatial dynamics resulted in complex, and at times, competing articulations of black nationalism.

Harris Kempner immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1854. He moved to Galveston, Texas, where he died in 1894. His sons continued his business in cotton, land, sugar, banking, and insurance and helped rebuild Galveston after the 1900 flood.

What questions ought historians investigate to understand the twentieth-century West? In nine original essays, noted senior scholars Robert Cherny, Thomas Cox, Fred Erisman, Richard Etulain, Gene Gressley, Roger Lotchin, Gerald Nash, and Glenda Riley offer insightful suggestion to aid the study of modern western history. The opportunities for research advanced here are means to be suggestive and open-ended, presenting new approaches and perspectives on a variety of topics. Some of the essays cover traditional areas such as economic, political, and cultural history; others examine the environment, cities, gender, and the myths of the West.An introduction and a conclusion offer masterful overviews of interpretations of the twentieth-century West. The individual essays also offer first-rate historiographic accounts that will interest students and specialists alike.

This work weaves together the complex interaction of social, political and historical forces that have shaped the United States and from which the American people have evolved by telling stories of people and of the nation.