For most historians, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the hostilities of the Civil War and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction give way to the nationalizing forces of cultural reunion, a process that is said to have downplayed sectional grievances and celebrated racial and industrial harmony. In truth, says Natalie J. Ring, this buoyant mythology competed with an equally powerful and far-reaching set of representations of the backward Problem South—one that shaped and reflected attempts by northern philanthropists, southern liberals, and federal experts to rehabilitate and reform the country's benighted region. Ring rewrites the history of sectional reconciliation and demonstrates how this group used the persuasive language of social science and regionalism to reconcile the paradox of poverty and progress by suggesting that the region was moving through an evolutionary period of “readjustment” toward a more perfect state of civilization. In addition, The Problem South contends that the transformation of the region into a mission field and laboratory for social change took place in a transnational moment of reform. Ambitious efforts to improve the economic welfare of the southern farmer, eradicate such diseases as malaria and hookworm, educate the southern populace, “uplift” poor whites, and solve the brewing “race problem” mirrored the colonial problems vexing the architects of empire around the globe. It was no coincidence, Ring argues, that the regulatory state's efforts to solve the “southern problem” and reformers' increasing reliance on social scientific methodology occurred during the height of U.S. imperial expansion.

In the late 1860s the U.S. federal government initiated the most abrupt transition from slavery to citizenship in the Americas. The transformation, of course, did not stick, but it did permanently alter the terms of American citizenship and initiated a century long struggle over the place of African Americans in the American polity. Southern Progressives, crucial in this account, were faced with a significant ideological challenge: how to reconcile their liberal principles with their commitments to racial hierarchy. The ideological work performed by Southern Progressives was instrumental to the establishment of white supremacist institutions in the heart of a putatively liberal democracy and illuminate how combinations of liberal and illiberal principles have affected the history of American political thought. In this work, Marek Steedman demonstrates how Southern Progressives combined commitments to liberal, even democratic, politics with equally strong commitments to the maintenance of racial hierarchy. He shows that there are systematic features of the traditions of liberal and republican thought, on the one hand, and ideologies of race, on the other, that facilitate their combination. Jim Crow Citizenship relates familiar developments in American state-building, legal development, and political thought to race, thus showing how race intertwines with these developments, often shaping them in decisive fashion.

"Gayle V. Fischer has produced a terrifically useful volume that no research library should be without." —The Journal of American History " . . . an indispensable resource to finding material on women's history throughout the world." —Journal of World History " . . . the work is recommended for its currency, depth of coverage, and scope." —Ethnic Forum As part of its mission to disseminate feminist scholarship and serve as the journal of record for the new area of women's history, the Journal of Women's History began a compilation of periodical literature dealing with women's history. This volume is drawn from more than 750 journals and includes material published from 1980 through 1990. There are forty subject categories and numerous subcategories. The guide lists more than 5,500 articles; all are extensively cross-listed.

To celebrate her forthcoming biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson, Anne Boyd Rioux has selected the best of this classic writer’s stories. Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894) was one of the few nineteenth-century women writers considered the equal of her male peers. Harper & Brothers was so enamored of her work that the firm agreed to publish whatever she could write. In this gathering, Rioux has chosen fiction over the course of Woolson’s life, including “In Sloane Street,” never published since it first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar. Woolson’s stories travel from the rural Midwest to the deep South and then across the Atlantic to Italy and England. Her strong characters and indelible settings provide continuity throughout this collection as do her concerns with passion, creativity, imagination, and the demands of society. Whether portraying the keeper of a Union soldiers’ cemetery in the defeated South, a woman writer whose genius goes unrecognized, or the ex-pat denizens of Florence, Woolson’s deft characterization and subtlety create a broad landscape of Americans and their ways no matter where they lived.

In this volume, twelve authors take a challenging new look at the South. Departing from the issue that has lately preoccupied observers of the South - the region's waning cultural distinctiveness - the contributors instead look at the dynamics of the region's long-troubled relationship with the rest of the nation. What they discover allows us all to view the current state and future course of the South, as well as its link to the broader culture and polity, in a new light. To envision the concept of the "Problem South," and what it means to those within and without the region, six historians have joined together with a sociologist, an economist, two literary scholars, a legal scholar, and a journalist. Their essays, which range in subject from the South's climate to its religious fundamentalism to its great outpouring of fiction and autobiography, are the products of strong and independent minds that cut across disciplines, disagree among themselves, blend contemporary and historical insights, and confront conventional wisdom and expedient generalities. Although consensus among the contributors was never the goal of this collection, some common themes do suggest themselves. Above all, there is not only a South defined by its geography, history, and society, but also a mythic and metaphoric South - one continually refashioned by national/regional discourse, trends and events. In addition, the South has long been a mirror in which America has viewed itself. The nation has sought, time and again, to change the region, but it has also used the South to expose and modify darker impulses of American culture.

Spanning more than three centuries, from the colonial era to the present, Van Deburg's overview analyzes the works of American historians, dramatists, novelists, poets, lyricists, and filmmakers -- and exposes, through those artists' often disquieting perceptions, the cultural underpinnings of American current racial attitudes and divisions. Crucial to Van Deburg's analysis is his contrast of black and white attitudes toward the Afro-American slave experience. There has, in fact, been a persistent dichotomy between the two races' literary, historical, and theatrical representations of slavery. If white culture-makers have stressed the "unmanning" of the slaves and encouraged such steteotypes as the Noble Savage and the comic minstrel to justify the blacks' subordination, Afro-Americans have emphasized a counter self-image that celebrates the slaves' creativity, dignity, pride, and assertiveness. ISBN 0-299-09634-3 (pbk.) : $12.50.

Seven Modern American Novelists was first published in 1964. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This volume provides critical introductions to seven of the most significant American novelists of this century, bringing together in convenient book form the material from some of the University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. The writers discussed and the contributing authors are Edith Wharton by Louis Auchincloss, Sinclair Lewis by Mark Schorer, F. Scott Fitzgerald by Charles E. Shain, William Faulkner by William Van O'Connor, Ernest Hemingway by Philip Young, Thomas Wolfe by C. Hugh Holman, and Nathanael West by Stanley Edgar Hyman. In an introduction Mr. O'Connor, who is one of the editors of the pamphlet series, discusses some critical principles as they apply to fiction writers in general and to twentieth-century American novelists in particular. He is the author of many volumes of literary criticism as well as a collection of short stories and was a professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Teachers, librarians, and others who use the material of the University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers for frequent reference or as classroom texts will find this book particularly useful. Biographical information about the writers as well as critical evaluations of their writing is given. A bibliography for each writer lists his works and critical and biographical works about him.

"All men are created equal." So wrote Thomas Jefferson, and so agreed with him the delegates from the American colonies. But we must not press them too closely nor insist on the literal interpretation of their words. They were not publishing a scientific treatise on human nature nor describing the physical, intellectual, and moral qualities of different races and different individuals, but they were bent upon a practical object in politics. They desired to sustain before the world the cause of independence by such appeals as they thought would have effect; and certainly the appeal to the sense of equal rights before God and the law is the most powerful that can be addressed to the masses of any people. This is the very essence of American democracy, that one man should have just as large opportunity as any other to make the most of himself, to come forward and achieve high standing in any calling to which he is inclined. To do this the bars of privilege have one by one been thrown down, the suffrage has been extended to every man, and public office has been opened to any one who can persuade his fellow-voters or their representatives to select him."