Search

In 2015 there emerged a nationwide campaign to remove all Confederate memorials commemorating white supremacy of "the old South" from public parks and city centers in the United States. Given that fighting racism and fascism is not equivalent to fighting monuments, one can ask if an attack on dead slaveholders and famous American Confederate generals is worth a large-scale cleansing of the American cultural landscape. Questioning some of the rationales of the campaign is not about defending these statues. If people democratically so decide, they may well get rid of any historical memorials they find ethically offensive. This essay deals with the issue as it pertains to the American cultural landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although common schooling began to take off in the northern United States around the 1830s, it did not gain great momentum in the South until the postbellum period. Spanning this lengthy Common School era, this article explores the role white supremacy played in both the development and the impediment of schooling for the masses in the southern United States. Through analysis of archival and other primary and secondary data sources, the ways in which white supremacist ideology and actions shape-shifted throughout this time in history are mapped and expounded upon. This includes the rhetorical strategies and actions carried out by southern school reformers and opponents within their speeches, editorials, sermons, and addresses to maintain or amplify white power. Prominent Common School figures who held residency within the former Confederate States of America such as William Henry Ruffner and J.L.M. Curry, as well as lesser-known educational advocates and opponents of education are highlighted. This article begins with some of the arguments that were made both for and against education of slaves, for or against common schooling of white children, and proceeds into many of the large-scale schooling efforts of the postbellum period, all analyzed through the lens of white supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is provided which discusses the issue's theme on the history of immigration to the U.S. Southern States and the concept of Southern exceptionalism with topics, including Latina cigar workers in Tampa, Florida, military bases in the South and dismantling Jim Crow.

The author presents a history of "The Journal of Southern History." He mentions the founding of the journal, the range of material covering the history of the Southern States, and his work as editor of the periodical.

The article focuses on social conditions of middle class or poor white people in 19th century Southern society, discussing Georgia governor George W. Towns' proclamation for arrest of William H. Sterling for the murder of Jonathan Glanton in Upson County in 1848. Topics include Frank L. Owsley's study "Plain Folk of the Old South", historian F. N. Boney's works on Georgia's poor whites and Daniel Hundley's study "Social Relations in our Southern States".

After the Civil War, the South faced a problem that was almost entirely new in the United States: a racially diverse and geographically integrated citizenry. In one fell swoop with emancipation, millions of former slaves were now citizens. The old system of plantation localism, built largely on the feudal control of the black population by wealthy white planters, was no longer viable. The urgent question facing both those who sought to reform and those who sought to preserve the "Old South" was: What should local government look like after emancipation? This Article tells the story of the struggle over the answer to that question. At the center of that struggle is an untold legal history of local government reform during Reconstruction. In the years immediately after the Civil War, idealistic Yankee reformers went south with the explicit aim of remaking the "fabric of southern culture" by rebuilding the South in the image of their northern homes. Specifically, in North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, these reformers rewrote state constitutions to replace the plantation and county court with townships modeled on the New England town. Southern conservatives resisted the new townships, understanding them as foreign impositions targeted to destroy their old way of life. Within a decade they had dismantled the new townships and built the foundations of a new Jim Crow local order rooted in the county and approximating a return to the plantation. By telling this new history, this Article contributes to present scholarship in at least two ways. First, the story highlights a binary struggle between "communitarian" localism embodied in the civic participation of the New England town and "proprietary" localism embodied in the private power of the plantation owner. This struggle was framed with crystal clarity during Reconstruction, but it remains a powerful analytic tool for understanding today's debates and struggles over local government. Second and relatedly, this history reveals the extent to which racial anxiety shaped and continues to shape local institutions. The communitarian township experiment was fueled by a vision of racial equality--and the white supremacist response to it was fueled by resentment and resistance to that vision. When we think about localism and racial inequality, we tend to think about the responses to school desegregation in the mid-twentieth century when racial resentment and fear during the "Second Reconstruction" drove white flight and contributed to resegregation through suburbanization. This Article shows that we may be looking at the wrong Reconstruction. In fact, the pathologies of local government, racial segregation, democracy, and protection of property were framed after the Civil War, in the crucible of a direct conflict between utopian racial egalitarianism and white supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long-standing historiography that the plantation system of the American South and the British West Indies was inimical to urbanization. If we focus on towns in the Lower South and the West Indies, however, rather than the Chesapeake, we see urbanization as central to plantation development. The slave trade was vital to this urbanization, forming the dynamic trade that allowed for entrepreneurial decision making. It allowed towns like Kingston, Charleston, and Bridgetown to become more than shipping points. They became places of deep linkages between different economic sectors. In addition, they had an independent, autonomous existence in which growth was endogenous and in which people found multiple opportunities for wealth creation and the pursuit of pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries proved transformative for Cherokee people. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Cherokees lived in towns and nurtured strong regional affiliations that were overlaid with the sacred obligations associated with membership in one of seven matrilineal clans. But all this changed. The encroaching Anglo settler frontier from the east and pressure from the Spanish, the French, and hostile Native warriors from the north all prompted changes in how Cherokee people represented themselves to outsiders. This article draws on colonial archives, missionary records, ethnographic travel writing, and the written and oral traditions of the Cherokee people to explore the importance of friendship among Cherokees in the Native South. What did friendship mean to Cherokees? How did Cherokees represent friendship? And how was friendship performed (and those performances interpreted) in diplomatic, social, and cultural contexts? These questions frame this essay's analysis as it seeks to enrich our understanding of friendship in Cherokee history and to highlight what Cherokee Chiefs meant when they declared "Our Hands and Hearts are Joined Together". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an essay where the author talks about being born in the U.S. South. Topics discussed include the authors early life in middle Tennessee, the impact of World War 2 in changing conditions in the South, and the author's white family benefiting from a way of life denied to African Americans.

The South has a long and sordid history of resisting school desegregation. Yet after a long and vigorous legal fight, by the mid-1980s, schools in the South became among the most desegregated in the country. An important but often underappreciated tool that aided in the fight to desegregate schools in the South was the conventional and strategic use of school district boundary lines. Many school systems in the South deliberately eschewed drawing school district boundary lines around municipalities and instead drew them around counties. The resulting county-based system of school districts allowed for the introduction of school assignment plans that crossed racially and economically segregated municipal boundary lines. Some affluent and predominantly white suburban municipalities in the South are threatening to reverse this progress. They are doing so by seceding from racially diverse county-based school districts and forming their own predominately white and middle-class school districts. The secessions are grounded in the race-neutral language of localism, or the preference for decentralized governance structures. However, localism in this context is threatening to do what Brown v. Board of Education outlawed: return schools to the days of separate and unequal with the imprimatur of state law. This Article is the first to examine Southern municipal school district secessions and the localism arguments that their supporters advance to justify them. It argues that localism is being used as a race-neutral proxy to create segregated school systems that are immune from legal challenge. It concludes by introducing a normative framework to evaluate the legitimacy of the localism justification for Southern school district secessions specifically and decentralized public education governance structures more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical institution of slavery is unevenly memorialized across the US's cultural landscape. This unevenness is particularly noticeable in ‘Deep South’ states such as Mississippi and Louisiana, where cotton and sugar cane plantations once required vast numbers of slaves to economically succeed. While many antebellum plantation sites now function as tourist attractions complete with ‘Big House’ tours, they often ignore or annihilate the memory of slavery from plantation history. However, not all plantations and museums disregard slavery, and the owners and workers at these sites intentionally employ slavery counter-narratives to evoke empathy in visitors and create a more socially just cultural landscape. This paper examines three sites along and beyond River Road that employ counter-narrative techniques: the Natchez Museum of African-American History and Culture, Frogmore Cotton Plantation, and Whitney Plantation. The paper includes a discussion of each site's narrative tactics and how they stand out from other plantation sites in their representation of slavery. Engaging in growing conversations on the possibilities of empathetic responses to counter-narrative spaces, this paper argues that empathy – while important and possible for many visitors and consumers at these sites of memory – may preclude important political activism and greater solidarity between racial groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the history of dirt eating in the Antebellum and early modern South. It explores the history and persistence of dirt eating, which reveals Southern views of class, race and nutrition. It looks at the importance role of dirt eating in defiining the eating habits and health of African Americans and poor whites during the period.

The article discusses various aspects of U.S. Civil War documents and archives containing information about the former Confederate States of America (Confederate) Army as of 2016, and it mentions the Southern Historical Society organization's efforts to collect and preserve historical documents which explain the Confederate's version of the war. "The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies" documents compilation and sectional reconciliation are assessed.

The article discusses the depiction of Spartan women as the symbol of ideal female citizenship in the U.S. North and South prior to the U.S. Civil War as reflected in the publication of several 19th century essays by U.S. writers and educators. The article also discusses the significance of classical education in the curriculum of U.S. schools, particularly in Southern states, the education of females in the U.S., and gender roles in the U.S. during the 19th century.

The article discusses the history of America's southern states in relation to the concept of dysplacement which involves the loss of a sense of identification with other people through a shared connection to a geographical location. Author Mark Vanhoenacker's book "Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot" is assessed, along with the phrase place lag which is used to describe a sense of disorientation at being removed from a place or home country. Urban renewal and social re-engineering are assessed.

An essay is presented on the extent of degree antebellum southerners were able to share a belief in the regional stereotypes created by their polemicists and political leaders, many of whom went to great lengths in describing their journeys, and sectional identities. Topics discussed include notions of regional polarization, the southern radicals' fight for independence by the 1850s, and the rise of an American aristocracy that transcended sectional lines.

Biographies are presented on the 19th century U.S. Southern photographers of Mobile, Alabama Chauncey Barnes and Harry E. Wallace, which includes information on their careers, their photographic works and daguerreotypes. An overview of their photography studios, including in regard to the role Barnes' slaves played in taking care of his studio, is provided.

An introduction is presented which discusses the articles within the issue on the theme of photography of the U.S. Southern States from the antebellum period through the early 21st century with topics, including daguerreotypes, the documentary photographer Ed Wheeler and African American Mardi Gras celebration in Lafayette, Louisiana.

The article provides information from the 2014 annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association (SHA), which was held in Atlanta, Georgia. The Secretary-Treasurer discusses topics of the meeting, including Southern emancipation, the legacy of the U.S. Civil War, and the history of capitalism in the South. He also provides the SHA financial statement for 2014.

An introduction is presented which discusses the essays within the issue on the U.S. Mississippi River in the 20th century with topics, including U.S. Southern identity, cartography and the depiction of the Mississippi River in the novel "Hard Blue Sky," by Shirley Ann Grau.

The article discusses a daguerreotype portrait of Richmond, Virginia, St. Paul's Episcopal Church then-pastor Rev. Dr. Charles Frederick Ernest Minnigerode that appeared on the U.S. television network Public Broadcasting Service program "Antiques Roadshow." According to the article, the portrait was taken by photographer William Abbott Pratt. The article discusses early photography in Richmond and the U.S. South, Pratt's career in Washington, D.C., prior to his removal to Richmond, and the significance of the relationship between Minnigerode and law professor Nathaniel Beverley Tucker.

The Great Migration-the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West-was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Americans born in the early twentieth century South. This inference comes from an analysis that uses proximity of birthplace to railroad lines as an instrument for migration. (JEL I12, J15, N31, N32, N91, N92, R23) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history and design of menus from restaurants in the U.S. South. Emphasis is given to topics such as ethnic influences on Southern cuisine, the exoticism of foreign foodways, the development of Southern cosmopolitanism, and the role of cultural diversity in regional modernization.

The article examines the important role played by U.S. author William Faulkner in the formalization of both U.S. literary studies and southern literary studies. Topics discussed include the application of southern studies as area studies under a nationalistic project during the Cold War. Also discussed are the origins of modern southern literature as an academic discipline and Faulkner's prominence in the literary criticism "Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South" in 1953.

An essay is presented concerning the work of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, author, orator, and poet Alexander Beaufort Meek, particularly regarding the history of the U.S. southwestern frontier and his influence upon 19th century American literature. It examines Meek's career as an orator, politician, and poet, the influence of the frontier on his writing and public life, and his conception of a southern literary tradition based upon intellectualism and natural aesthetic appreciation. It also discusses several of Meek's works including "The Red Eagle: A Poem of the South."

Walter Sullivan (1924-2006), a Nashville, Tennessee native who spent most of his academic and professional life at Vanderbilt University, is generally considered and the Southern Renaissance to which they belong. This essay seeks to position Sullivan's second, largely forgotten novel, The Long, Long Love as part of the post-agrarian, post-Renaissance, postmodern, and post-southern American intellectual reevaluation of the South that questions tradition through an assertion of "pro-New South, pro-urban, and pro-capitalist" values and thoroughly reconsiders Civil War "truths," myths, history, and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on legal restrictions surrounding the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the U.S. South. Particular focus is given to the author's home state, North Carolina, and to the author's memories of illegal drinking practices and establishments. Details on the patent medicine known as Hadacol, created by Louisiana politician Dudley LeBlanc, are also presented.

Drawing primarily on archival material such as plantation records, this article places the figure of the plantation overseer at the centre of the drama of the American Revolution in the southern colonies. Occupying a contested liminal space within colonial society, between rich and poor, and between the free and the unfree, the overseer was not necessarily the ne'er-do-well of conventional stereotype. This “Predatory War,” however, tested the overseer's loyalties and sense of duty to the fullest extent. Understanding his role in the conflict offers a significant insight into the experience of a plantation society at war. In particular the overseer was caught in the tension between elite and yeomanry, between the conflicting calls of loyalism and the cause of the Patriots. Perhaps most significantly of all he stood at the forefront of the defence of race slavery during the tumult of civil conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although it can seem paradoxical today that the federal government redistributes from "blue" states where majorities are tolerant of federal taxation to "red" states where they are hostile, the rhetoric was more straightforward in the politics surrounding the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment a century ago. In fact, Southerners and Westerners demanded the adoption of the federal income tax for the obvious reason that it would benefit their constituents. By exempting income taxation from the apportionment rule that the Constitution specifies for "direct taxes," the Sixteenth Amendment allowed Congress to tax in proportion to the distribution of income rather than the distribution of population. Because of the lopsided geographical distribution of income at the time, this procedure generated lopsided contributions from the high-income states of the Northeast, particularly New York. Yet some Southerners also thought the income tax was potentially dangerous because it would strengthen the federal government, with results that could potentially threaten their oppression of African Americans (disfranchisement, segregation, and rampant lynching). White Southerners worried about the safety of white supremacy in their debates with each other about whether to ratify the Sixteenth Amendment. In the end, however, they ratified enthusiastically, not only because they knew that their states would benefit, but also because they believed, correctly, that Northerners had lost interest in attempting to protect the rights of African Americans. Thus, this milestone in the history of taxation exemplified the irony of the Progressive Era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Electric Home and Farm Authority's (EHFA's) subsidizing electric kitchen appliance industry and its impact modernizing the kitchen in the U.S. Southern States during the 1930s and early 1940s. The role that the EHFA's subsidies had in lowering the cost of electric kitchen appliances is discussed.

Frederick Law Olmsted is widely admired by historians of the nineteenth-century United States and generally regarded as the single most important commentator upon slavery and the South. He toured the southern states in the early 1850s and published a series of reports in the New York Daily Times and the New York Daily Tribune. These articles were subsequently revised and compiled into three books, but it was their publication as a single, edited volume, The Cotton Kingdom (1861), which had the greatest impact. This article revisits perhaps the central insight provided by Olmsted: his criticism of the southern work ethic and the South's reluctance "to work industriously and steadily." It does so within the context of current scholarly interpretations of capitalism in the late antebellum South, where most scholars have taken issue with Olmsted's view, presenting instead a dynamic and hard-working southern workforce. Why did Olmsted take such an overly critical view of the southern work ethic? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An outpouring of historical research has greatly contributed to our understanding of the political, economic, demographic, and business aspects of interregional slave migration in the antebellum period. As yet, however, relatively few studies have examined the assimilation process of slave migrants who were sent to the Lower South. Particularly their adaption to new work patterns and cultivation techniques has eluded the attention of most scholars. What kinds of work did Upper South slave migrants perform upon arrival in the cotton South? How did they adapt to new work? Drawing from a variety of source material, including slave testimonies, this study will very briefly explore cotton cultivation from the perspective of enslaved newcomers from the Upper South. It will especially delve into the abrupt transition with which interstate migrants in the antebellum period were confronted, comparing and contrasting the demands of plantation agriculture in both regions and underscoring the learning curves involved in migrants' assimilation process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The antislavery activity of the religious fringe of Atlantic Presbyterianism, Covenanters, has been neglected. Covenanters produced longstanding articulations of antislavery rooted in seventeenth-century Scotland. In America, Covenanters created an ignored alternative to traditional paradigms of slavery debates. They were antislavery Biblical literalists. In the American South, their support of the American Colonization Society (ACS) was an attempt to maintain their faith, and they believed the ACS was their brainchild. Everywhere, Covenanters utilized antislavery to maintain connection to their Old World religious traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The TVA has been applauded for its anti-malaria programs in the Southeast during the 1930s and 1940s. However, the TVA developed their anti-malaria programs because they created lakes suitable for mosquito breeding. To estimate the relationship between the TVA and malaria, I construct a county-level panel data from the Southeast United States. I find that the net effect of the TVA was to increase malaria rates following its construction. Using statistical life value estimates, I find that the hidden malaria cost of the TVA offset 24 percent of the fiscal stimulus multiplier generated by the TVA. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For free black women in the pre-Civil War American South, the status offered by ‘freedom’ was uncertain and malleable. The conceptualization of bondage and freedom as two diametrically opposed conditions therefore fails to make sense of the complexities of life for these women. Instead, notions of enslavement and freedom are better framed as a spectrum. This article develops this idea by exploring two of the ways in which some black women negotiated their status before the law—namely though petitioning for residency or for enslavement. While these petitions are atypical numerically, and often offer tantalizingly scant evidence, when used in conjunction with evidence from the US census, it becomes clear that these women were highly pragmatic. Prioritizing their spousal and broader familial affective relationships above their legal status, they rejected the often theoretical distinction between slavery and liberation. As such, the petitions can be used to reach broader conclusions about the attitudes of women who have left little written testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A bibliography of several periodical articles about Southern U.S. history in 2012 is presented, including "Finding the Southern Family in the Civil War" by Jane Turner Censer in "Journal of Social History," "The Struggle Begins Early: Head Start and the Mississippi Freedom Movement" by Jon N. Hale in "History of Education Quarterly, and "Nikki Giovanni: Literary Survivor Across Centuries" by Trudier Harris in "Appalacian Heritage."

Despite growing reliance on census data for historical research in the United States, there has been little systematic evaluation of census quality. This article relies on back-projection methods, new estimates of nineteenth-century mortality, and the 1850-1940 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) samples to estimate age- and sex-specific net census underenumeration of the native-born white population in the United States in the 1850-1930 censuses. National and section of birth estimates are constructed. In general, the results suggest slightly higher net undercounts for native-born white males relative to native-born white females, slightly higher net undercounts in the South, and a modest trend toward greater census coverage over time. A few censuses stand out as anomalous. The 1870 census suffered a higher net rate of omission than any other census. The net undercount was especially high in the South, probably reflecting the unsettled conditions in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The net undercount was not nearly as great as nineteenth-century observers speculated and subsequent historians have long believed, however. The 1880 census appears to have achieved the most complete coverage of the native-born white population before 1940. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the residents of U.S. Southern States' efforts to prevent railroad trains from passing through their towns in the later 19th century so as to prevent the yellow fever epidemic from spreading there. An overview of Southern cities' municipal governments' instituting of quarantines, including in Jacksonville, Florida, is provided. The role that yellow fever played in the Southern States' economic conditions, including the impact of quarantines on railroad travel, is discussed.

An essay is presented which discusses the status of the U.S. Southerner as the other, deriving from a history in which race relations between African Americans and whites putatively separated the U.S. Southern States from the rest of the country. An overview of the history of U.S. Southern States' culture from 1619 through 2012, including the region's alleged hospitality, gender relations and religion, is provided

The article discusses the history of the concubinage of enslaved black women in the U.S. Southern States. Topics include sexual assaults against enslaved women, the social and economic significance of lighter skin color among slaves of mixed race, and domestic labor performed by concubines. Also addressed are the reactions of white wives to the practice of concubinage, the relation of adultery to laws against interracial marriage, and violent acts committed against slaves who refused to engage in sexual relations with their masters.

The history of postal service during the Civil War is surprisingly underdeveloped, and little is known about the Confederate Post Office Department. It labored under a strict mandate to achieve fiscal self-sufficiency, to which all other service rationales were subordinate. This policy, in conjunction with a multitude of war-related privations, hampered the Department's ability to foster the substantive or reliable circulation of information, complicating the process of democratic nation-building in which postal services have historically played an important role. After examining reports of the Confederate Postmaster General, coverage of postal operations in Southern newspapers, scholarship in state and local historical publications, and the study of philately, the implications of the Confederacy's fixation on the economic performance of its postal service might well serve as a cautionary tale as the practices of modern media policymaking evolve along similar lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1932, Frank Adair Jr. achieved his Certified Public Accountant (CPA) status as the sixth African American CPA in the US and only the second in the Deep South. Although his active professional career was brief (5 years), it typifies not only the difficulty experienced by an African American achieving this designation in the Jim Crow South, but also the factors that were necessary for such an achievement to occur in that time period. First, Adair Jr. practiced in a dynamic and vibrant segregated business community. Second, he was educated at a black college. An African American who wanted to stay in the Deep South would have had no other option. Third, he benefitted from a strong professional mentoring relationship that enabled him to forge his career path. Inadvertently, Adair Jr. was omitted from the 1990 NABA report of the first one hundred African American CPAs. This historical note seeks to correct that omission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With all the new information uncovered about the growth of baseball prior to the establishment of the National Association in 1871, comparatively little attention has been paid to the spread of the game in the Southern United States. Using newspaper articles and army records, the author presents the early history of Southern baseball, a history that in most respects parallels the more publicized growth of baseball in the North. Southern baseball, the author contends, should not be viewed as a footnote to Northern baseball, mentionable only when Northern teams played there, but rather as a regional adoption of the game, as important as the baseball played during this era in the Midwest or West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]