Freedpeople In The Tobacco South

Author : Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2003-07-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780807861141

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Freedpeople in the Tobacco South by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie Pdf

Throughout the colonial and antebellum periods, Virginia's tobacco producers exploited slave labor to ensure the profitability of their agricultural enterprises. In the wake of the Civil War, however, the abolition of slavery, combined with changed market conditions, sparked a breakdown of traditional tobacco culture. Focusing on the transformation of social relations between former slaves and former masters, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie traces the trajectory of this breakdown from the advent of emancipation to the stirrings of African American migration at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing upon a rich array of sources, Kerr-Ritchie situates the struggles of newly freed people within the shifting parameters of an older slave world, examines the prolonged agricultural depression and structural transformation the tobacco economy underwent between the 1870s and 1890s, and surveys the effects of these various changes on former masters as well as former slaves. While the number of older freedpeople who owned small parcels of land increased phenomenally during this period, he notes, so too did the number of freedom's younger generation who deserted the region's farms and plantations for Virginia's towns and cities. Both these processes contributed to the gradual transformation of the tobacco region in particular and the state in general.

Author : Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9798890867919

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Freedpeople in the Tobacco South by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie Pdf

Author : Evan P. Bennett
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2014-10-21
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813055084

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When Tobacco Was King by Evan P. Bennett Pdf

Tobacco has left an indelible mark on the American South, shaping the land and culture throughout the twentieth-century. In the last few decades, advances in technology and shifts in labor and farming policy have altered the way of life for tobacco farmers: family farms have largely been replaced by large-scale operations dependent on hired labor, much of it from other shores. However, the mechanical harvester and the H-2A guestworker did not put an end to tobacco culture but rather sent it in new directions and accelerated the change that has always been part of the farmer’s life. In When Tobacco Was King, Evan Bennett examines the agriculture of the South’s original staple crop in the Old Bright Belt—a diverse region named after the unique bright, or flue-cured, tobacco variety it spawned. He traces the region’s history from Emancipation to the abandonment of federal crop controls in 2004 and highlights the transformations endured by blacks and whites, landowners and tenants, to show how tobacco farmers continued to find meaning and community in their work despite these drastic changes.

Author : Thomas J. Brown
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2008-09-23
Category : History
ISBN : 0199723974

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Reconstructions by Thomas J. Brown Pdf

The pivotal era of Reconstruction has inspired an outstanding historical literature. In the half-century after W.E.B. DuBois published Black Reconstruction in America (1935), a host of thoughtful and energetic authors helped to dismantle racist stereotypes about the aftermath of emancipation and Union victory in the Civil War. The resolution of long-running interpretive debates shifted the issues at stake in Reconstruction scholarship, but the topic has remained a vital venue for original exploration of the American past. In Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, eight rising historians survey the latest generation of work and point to promising directions for future research. They show that the field is opening out to address a wider range of adjustments to the experiences and effects of Civil War. Increased interest in cultural history now enriches understandings traditionally centered on social and political history. Attention to gender has joined a focus on labor as a powerful strategy for analyzing negotiations over private and public authority. The contributors suggest that Reconstruction historiography might further thrive by strengthening connections to such subjects as western history, legal history, and diplomatic history, and by redefining the chronological boundaries of the postwar period. The essays provide more than a variety of attractive vantage points for fresh examination of a major phase of American history. By identifying the most exciting recent approaches to a theme previously studied so ably, the collection illuminates the creative process in scholarly historical literature.

Author : Amy Feely Morsman
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2010-10-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813930084

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The Big House after Slavery by Amy Feely Morsman Pdf

The Big House after Slavery examines the economic, social, and political challenges that Virginia planter families faced following Confederate defeat and emancipation. Amy Feely Morsman addresses how men and women of the planter class responded to postwar problems and how their adaptations to life without slavery altered their marital relationships and their conceptions of gender roles. Unable to afford many servants in the new free labor economy, many of Virginia’s former masters put themselves to work on their plantations, and their wives had to expand their responsibilities as well, taking on the tasks of cooking and cleaning in addition to working in the garden, the henhouse, and the dairy. Laboring in these ways and struggling to maintain their standing as elites contributed to an identity crisis among Virginia planters. It also led them to practice mutuality within their own marriages and to reconsider what proper Southern womanhood and manhood meant in the new postwar order. Using newspapers, periodicals, organization records, and numerous letters from Virginia plantation families, Morsman captures how these frustrated elites made sense of embarrassing postwar changes, in the private but also in the public spheres they inhabited. Morsman suggests that the planters’ adaptations may have been carried forward by their adult children away from the crumbling plantations and into the urban households of the New South.

Author : Daniel B. Thorp
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2017-12-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780813940748

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Facing Freedom by Daniel B. Thorp Pdf

The history of African Americans in southern Appalachia after the Civil War has largely escaped the attention of scholars of both African Americans and the region. In Facing Freedom, Daniel Thorp relates the complex experience of an African American community in southern Appalachia as it negotiated a radically new world in the four decades following the Civil War. Drawing on extensive research in private collections as well as local, state, and federal records, Thorp narrates in intimate detail the experiences of black Appalachians as they struggled to establish autonomous families, improve their economic standing, operate black schools within a white-controlled school system, form independent black churches, and exercise expanded—if contested—roles as citizens and members of the body politic. Black out-migration increased markedly near the close of the nineteenth century, but the generation that transitioned from slavery to freedom in Montgomery County established the community institutions that would survive disenfranchisement and Jim Crow. Facing Freedom reveals the stories and strategies of those who pioneered these resilient bulwarks against the rising tide of racism.

Author : Sharon Ann Holt
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2010-01-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780820327198

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Making Freedom Pay by Sharon Ann Holt Pdf

The end of slavery left millions of former slaves destitute in a South as unsettled as they were. In Making Freedom Pay, Sharon Ann Holt reconstructs how freed men and women in tobacco-growing central North Carolina worked to secure a place for themselves in this ravaged region and hostile time. Without ignoring the crushing burdens of a system that denied blacks justice and civil rights, Holt shows how many black men and women were able to realize their hopes through determined collective efforts. Holt's microeconomic history of Granville County, North Carolina, drawn extensively from public records, assembles stories of individual lives from the initial days of emancipation to the turn of the century. Making Freedom Pay uses these highly personalized accounts of the day-to-day travails and victories of ordinary people to tell a nationally significant story of extraordinary grassroots uplift. That racist terrorism and Jim Crow legislation substantially crushed and silenced them in no way trivializes the significance of their achievements.

Author : Drew A. Swanson
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2014-08-12
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9780300206814

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A Golden Weed by Drew A. Swanson Pdf

Drew A. Swanson has written an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the author provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters. Swanson, who brings to his narrative the experience of having grown up on a working Virginia tobacco farm, explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. He weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this innovative study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.

Author : Manning Marable,Adina Popescu,Khary Jones,Patricia Lespinasse
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2015-12-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317255512

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New Black Renaissance by Manning Marable,Adina Popescu,Khary Jones,Patricia Lespinasse Pdf

Against a backdrop of multiculturalism and Afrocentricity in the intellectual traditions of African-American studies, this book sets new standards and directions for the future. It is the first book to systematically address the many themes that have changed the political and social landscape for African-Americans. Among these changes are new transnational processes of globalization, the devastating impact of neoliberal public policies upon urban minority communities, increasing imprisonment and attendant loss of voting rights especially among black males, the surging of Hispanic population, and widening class differences as deindustrialization, crack cocaine, and gentrification entered urban communities. Marable and a cast of influential contributors suggest that a new beginning is needed for African-American scholarship. They explain why Black Studies needs to break its conceptual and thematic limitations, exploring "blackness" in new ways and in different geographic sites. They outline the major intersectionalities that should shape a new Black Studies-the complex relationships between race, gender, sexuality, class and youth. They argue that African-American Studies scholarship must help shape and redirect public policies that affect black communities, working with government, foundations and other private institutions on such issues as housing, health care, and criminal justice.

Author : Jeffrey W. McClurken
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2009-08-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813928197

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Take Care of the Living by Jeffrey W. McClurken Pdf

Take Care of the Living assesses the short- and long-term impact of the war on Confederate veteran families of all classes in Pittsylvania County and Danville, Virginia. Using letters, diaries, church minutes, and military and state records, as well as close analysis of the entire 1860 and 1870 Pittsylvania County manuscript population census, McClurken explores the consequences of the war for over three thousand Confederate soldiers and their families. The author reveals an array of strategies employed by those families to come to terms with their postwar reality, including reorganizing and reconstructing the household, turning to local churches for emotional and economic support, pleading with local elites for financial assistance or positions, sending psychologically damaged family members to a state-run asylum, and looking to the state for direct assistance in the form of replacement limbs for amputees, pensions, and even state-supported homes for old soldiers and widows. Although these strategies or institutions for reconstructing the family had their roots in existing practices, the extreme need brought on by the scope and impact of the Civil War required an expansion beyond anything previously seen. McClurken argues that this change serves as a starting point for the study of the evolution of southern welfare.

Author : Justin Behrend
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780820340333

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Reconstructing Democracy by Justin Behrend Pdf

Within a few short years after emancipation, freedpeople of the Natchez District created a new democracy in the Reconstruction era, replacing the oligarchic rule of slaveholders and Confederates with a grassroots democracy that transformed the South after the Civil War.

Author : Lynn A. Nelson
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2009-12-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780820334165

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Pharsalia by Lynn A. Nelson Pdf

Pharsalia, a plantation located in piedmont Virginia at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is one of the best-documented sites of its kind. Drawing on the exceptionally rich trove of papers left behind by the Massie family, Pharsalia's owners, this case study demonstrates how white southern planters paradoxically relied on capitalistic methods even as they pursued an ideal of agrarian independence. Lynn A. Nelson also shows how the contradictions between these ends and means would later manifest themselves in the southern conservation movement. Nelson follows the fortunes of Pharsalia's owners, telling how Virginia's traditional extensive agriculture contributed to the soil's erosion and exhaustion. Subsequent attempts to balance independence and sustainability through a complex system of crop rotation and resource recycling ultimately gave way to an intensive, slave-based form of agricultural capitalism. Pharsalia could not support the Massies' aristocratic ambitions, and it was eventually parceled up and sold off by family members. The farm's story embodies several fundamentals of modern U.S. environmental thought. Southerners' nineteenth-century quest for financial and ecological independence provided the background for conservationists' attempts to save family farming. At the same time, farmers' failure to achieve independence while maximizing profits and crop yields drove them to seek government aid and regulation. These became some of the hallmarks of conservation efforts in the New Deal and beyond.

Author : Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 1232 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2014-02-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9781118802953

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A Companion to the U.S. Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean Pdf

A Companion to the U.S. Civil War presents a comprehensive historiographical collection of essays covering all major military, political, social, and economic aspects of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Represents the most comprehensive coverage available relating to all aspects of the U.S. Civil War Features contributions from dozens of experts in Civil War scholarship Covers major campaigns and battles, and military and political figures, as well as non-military aspects of the conflict such as gender, emancipation, literature, ethnicity, slavery, and memory

Author : Michael T. Martin,Marilyn Yaquinto
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 725 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2007-07-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780822389811

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Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States by Michael T. Martin,Marilyn Yaquinto Pdf

An exceptional resource, this comprehensive reader brings together primary and secondary documents related to efforts to redress historical wrongs against African Americans. These varied efforts are often grouped together under the rubric “reparations movement,” and they are united in their goal of “repairing” the injustices that have followed from the long history of slavery and Jim Crow. Yet, as this collection reveals, there is a broad range of opinions as to the form that repair might take. Some advocates of redress call for apologies; others for official acknowledgment of wrongdoing; and still others for more tangible reparations: monetary compensation, government investment in disenfranchised communities, the restitution of lost property and rights, and repatriation. Written by activists and scholars of law, political science, African American studies, philosophy, economics, and history, the twenty-six essays include both previously published articles and pieces written specifically for this volume. Essays theorize the historical and legal bases of claims for redress; examine the history, strengths, and limitations of the reparations movement; and explore its relation to human rights and social justice movements in the United States and abroad. Other essays evaluate the movement’s primary strategies: legislation, litigation, and mobilization. While all of the contributors support the campaign for redress in one way or another, some of them engage with arguments against reparations. Among the fifty-three primary documents included in the volume are federal, state, and municipal acts and resolutions; declarations and statements from organizations including the Black Panther Party and the NAACP; legal briefs and opinions; and findings and directives related to the provision of redress, from the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 to the mandate for the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States is a thorough assessment of the past, present, and future of the modern reparations movement. Contributors. Richard F. America, Sam Anderson, Martha Biondi, Boris L. Bittker, James Bolner, Roy L. Brooks, Michael K. Brown, Robert S. Browne, Martin Carnoy, Chiquita Collins, J. Angelo Corlett, Elliott Currie, William A. Darity, Jr., Adrienne Davis, Michael C. Dawson, Troy Duster, Dania Frank, Robert Fullinwider, Charles P. Henry, Gerald C. Horne, Robert Johnson, Jr., Robin D. G. Kelley, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., David Lyons, Michael T. Martin, Douglas S. Massey , Muntu Matsimela , C. J. Munford, Yusuf Nuruddin, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Melvin L. Oliver, David B. Oppenheimer, Rovana Popoff, Thomas M. Shapiro, Marjorie M. Shultz, Alan Singer, David Wellman, David R. Williams, Eric K. Yamamoto, Marilyn Yaquinto

Author : Christopher B. Bean
Publisher : Fordham University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2016-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780823268771

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Too Great a Burden to Bear by Christopher B. Bean Pdf

In its brief seven-year existence, the Freedmen’s Bureau became the epicenter of the debate about Reconstruction. Historians have only recently begun to focus on the Bureau’s personnel in Texas, the individual agents termed the “hearts of Reconstruction.” Specifically addressing the historiographical debates concerning the character of the Bureau and its sub-assistant commissioners (SACs), Too Great a Burden to Bear sheds new light on the work and reputation of these agents. Focusing on the agents on a personal level, author Christopher B. Bean reveals the type of man Bureau officials believed qualified to oversee the Freedpeople’s transition to freedom. This work shows that each agent, moved by his sense of fairness and ideas of citizenship, gender, and labor, represented the agency’s policy in his subdistrict. These men further ensured the former slaves’ right to an education and right of mobility, something they never had while in bondage.