The Anti-Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles as a Reconstruction-Era Event

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Jew
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
American South ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
California History ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
The American South ◽  
Changing Times ◽  
Social Orders

Long regarded as a violent outburst significant mainly for California history, the 1871 Los Angeles anti-Chinese massacre raises themes central to America’s Civil War Reconstruction era between 1865 and 1877, namely, the resort to threats and violence to preserve traditionally conceived social and political authority and power. Although the Los Angeles events occurred far from the American South, the Los Angeles anti-Chinese massacre paralleled the anti-black violence that rose in the South during Reconstruction. Although the immediate causes of the violence in the post–Civil War South and California were far different, they shared one key characteristic: they employed racial disciplining to preserve traditional social orders that old elites saw as threatened by changing times and circumstances.

2. Section to nation

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Economic System ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
American South ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Identity ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
The American South ◽  
Sectional Identity

‘Section to nation’ examines how, by 1830, the American South had long had a predominantly agricultural economy. Its people soon idealized the agrarian republic that had taken shape after the American Revolution as the basis for an emerging sectional identity. Slavery was the basis of a productive economic system, in which the South was enmeshed with northern merchants and traders and the whole financial world of England. The American Civil War undermined southern ideology dramatically through the emancipation of slaves. The Reconstruction era would be nearly equal to the Civil War in forging a self-conscious white southern identity.

scholarly journals The Post-Bellum Recovery of the South and the Cost of the Civil War

1976 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 898-907 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Labor Supply ◽  
American South ◽  
The South ◽  
Rate Of Growth ◽  
Lasting Effect ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Cost

In the last half of the nineteenth century the economy of the American South experienced three separate shocks which have been analyzed separately by different authors. This note synthesizes the literature and presents an integrated story in which the decline in the rate of growth of the demand for cotton (noted by Wright) and the results of emancipation on the southern labor supply (noted by Ransom and Sutch) had equal impacts on measured income in the post-bellum South. The Civil War itself had a much smaller and less lasting effect on southern income than Coldin and Lewis assumed; in the long run, it was the least important of the three shocks.

Police Torture and “Legal Lynchings” in the American South

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-38
Author(s):  
Silvan Niedermeier
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American South ◽  
Black History ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Women ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Law Enforcement Officials ◽  
The American South

This chapter examines the connection between the torture inflicted by law enforcement officials in the South during the 1930s and 1940s and the decline in the number of lynching of African Americans during this period. The Scottsboro case displays the racist structure of the justice system and outlines the tradition of violence and pattern of African Americans accused of rape and sexual assault. The illustration of violence further examines black history involving the Reconstruction era in which African American challenged for equality against white supremacy. Emphasized in this chapter is the process of torture by lynching against African American. Lynching aimed to discipline landless blacks and serve as a fear and embed a stereotype of racial difference. The decrease of lynching occurred in the early 1900s as the South questioned their reputation, and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) promoted anti-lynching campaigns. The case of Ed Brown, Arthur Ellington, and Henry Shields documents the violent dynamics that tended to emerge as state authorities increasingly asserted their monopoly on the use of force in the South.

Cotton Competition and the Post-Bellum Recovery of the American South

1974 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 610-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Wright
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American South ◽  
The South ◽  
Economic Expansion ◽  
World Markets ◽  
The World ◽  
The American South

As evidence has accumulated on the prosperity of the American South under slavery prior to the Civil War, attention has turned to a search for explanations for the apparent stagnation of the southern economy after the Civil War. One class of explanations involves the argument that the South experienced special difficulties in recovering her place in the international cotton market during the late 1860's and 1870's. In one version of this hypothesis, the presence of “new” sources of supply, stimulated by the cotton famine of 1861–65, acted to displace American cotton in world markets during this period. A second version, recently proposed by Mark Aldrich, argues that appreciation of the dollar resulting from capital imports and northern economic expansion forced American cotton to compete with the rest of the world on unfavorable terms prior to the resumption of specie payments in 1879.

The Growth Strategies of Southern Railroads, 1865-1893

1967 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maury Klein ◽  
Kozo Yamamura
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American South ◽  
Growth Strategies ◽  
The South ◽  
Regional Transport ◽  
The American South

Railroads were unquestionably a leading sector of economic development in the American South following the Civil War. By appraising the growth strategies followed by southern roads as functions of their profitability, the authors illustrate how the supply of regional transport in the South was patterned by the decisions of competing groups of businessmen.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Diane Miller Sommerville
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Gender Bias ◽  
American South ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
The American South ◽  
And Gender

Lays out blueprint for the book by outlining methodological approaches, evidence base, and historiographical interventions (including ‘dark turn’ in Civil War scholarship) of a study on suicide and suffering during and after the Civil War in the American South. Identifies evidentiary challenges including poor record keeping, attempts to hide suicides, elusiveness of cause or motivation, and gender bias in lethal suicides. Case studies emphasize experiences of individuals, transcending well-trodden theological and cultural discourse about suicide. Examines impact of war traumas like PTSD on soldiers and veterans, and on their wives and families. Racialized ideas about suicide and depression shaped southerners’ understanding of suffering, held by whites to be a marker of civilized peoples.

Southern Agrarians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny LeRoy
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
The South ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
The American South ◽  
John Crowe Ransom

The Southern Agrarians were twelve writers from the American South who advocated a return to an agrarian-based economy throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In their 1930 collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) and others attacked the system of modern industrial capitalism and its effect on the traditional way of Southern life.

“Back into the Days of Slavery”: Freedom, Citizenship, and the Black Family in the Reconstruction-Era Courtroom

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-161
Author(s):  
Giuliana Perrone
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Black Family ◽  
The South ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Domestic Law

This article analyses domestic law cases brought by former slaves during the decade following the Civil War. It argues that ending slavery was a long and complex process that included not only granting rights to freedpeople, but also subtracting the incapacities previously imposed by bondage and applying certain rights retroactively. Reconstruction-era judges, throughout the era and across the South, overlooked the realities of slavery as a lived institution. Instead, they reimagined slavery as a collection of legal disabilities that could simply be subtracted and summarily resolved. This is how they would carry out abolition. The notion that slavery had to be undone stands in contrast to prevailing scholarship that emphasizes the acquisition and exercise of rights as demonstrative of consummate freedom. Instead, this article shows that even when positive law and judicial rulings were used to deconstruct the peculiar institution, slavery, as a legal construct, could not be fully demolished. Judges and freedpeople alike were left to face troubling legacies for which there was no remedy. No performance of legal acrobatics could alter, undo, or fully resolve the myriad ways slavery continued to affect many former slaves and influence the direction of their free lives. Abolition would remain incomplete.

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