1. Becoming southern

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
New World ◽  
American South ◽  
Regional Culture ◽  
Southern Identity ◽  
Staple Crops ◽  
The American South ◽  
Fertile Land

‘Becoming Southern’ discusses how Native Americans became the first southerners. They developed the first regional culture from environmental conditions that would always be a foundation of regional life. The Europeans who came to what became the American South brought with them preconceptions about that area, which were part of a New World that evoked images of fertile land that produced staple crops to enrich European nations, but also represented exploitation of African and indigenous labor and the threat of racial intermingling. The early 1700s were crucial years in the emergent South. The American Revolution itself was a landmark in the appearance of a self-conscious southern identity.

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.

Slave Culture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Sustained Attention ◽  
American South ◽  
Source Population ◽  
Work Patterns ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Task System ◽  
The American South

This article reviews scholarship on slave culture and the slave experience. Historians of the American South have had an interest in slavery since the early twentieth century but not until fairly recently have they paid sustained attention to the enslaved. Historians have begun to examine slaves, providing a bottom-up analysis of how slavery and slaves shaped their culture, daily lives, and southern white culture generally. This more recent emphasis has been sensitive to the importance of variables: how southern slave culture was shaped by time, place, work patterns, source population (the origins of African-born slaves); whether a region was under English, Dutch, Spanish, Spanish, French, or American jurisdiction; whether slaves lived and worked in societies with slaves or slave societies; whether slaves were skilled, toiled under the task system, or were gang labour; whether they produced tobacco, indigo, rice, sugar, and cotton; their proximity to Native Americans or Spaniards; and whether they lived in times of war or peace.

Resilience of Southern Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Cooper ◽  
H. Gibbs Knotts
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
American South ◽  
First Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Remarkable Change ◽  
Southern Identity ◽  
Interstate Highway System ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
The American South

The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region’s politics have shifted from one-party Democratic to the near-domination of the Republican Party, and in-migration has increased its population. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded--chain restaurants have replaced mom-and-pop diners, and the interstate highway system connects the region to the rest of the country. Given all of these changes, many have argued that southern identity is fading. But here, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts show how these changes have allowed for new types of southern identity to emerge. For some, identification with the South has become more about a connection to the region’s folkways or to place than about policy or ideology. For others, the contemporary South is all of those things at once--a place where many modern-day southerners navigate the region’s confusing and omnipresent history. Regardless of how individuals see the South, this study argues that the region’s drastic political, racial, and cultural changes have not lessened the importance of southern identity but have played a key role in keeping regional identification relevant in the twenty-first century.

A People’s History of American Prohibition

2021 ◽  
pp. 450-486
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Upton Sinclair ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
Elected Representatives

Chapter 16 examines the predations of the parasitic Gilded Age “liquor trusts”--akin to the big railroad, steel, and financial trusts--including the United States Brewers’ Association and the Liquor Dealers’ Association, which corrupted law enforcement and government representatives. Unlike these trusts, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) could not buy off politicians, but relied on agitation and publicity—ensuring that constituents were fully informed as to their elected representatives’ voting records on temperance. Progressive prohibitionists made common cause with good-governance “muckrakers” like Pussyfoot Johnson and Upton Sinclair. The chapter turns to the wave of state-level prohibitions, beginning with the Oklahoma’s prohibition statehood in 1907, drawing on the long-standing prohibitionism of Native Americans. From there, the “dry wave” swept the American South, where the liquor traffic was more diffused and less organized, and temperance sentiment was strong among both white and black communities.

European Empires in the American South

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
American South ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Native People ◽  
The South ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
The American South ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This multi-authored volume examines the process of European expansion into the Atlantic by focusing on a region that has come to be known as the American South. During the three centuries after Europeans began to cross the Atlantic with confidence, they interacted with one another, with the native people, and with enslaved Africans across the South. The volume's essays offer examples of colonial encounter for those who are curious about how the broad processes of historical change influenced particular people and places. In recent years there have appeared several important studies that address the Atlantic World generally and/or the specific experiences of Spanish, British, and French imperial projects in the South. A key aspect of each of these colonial schemes was finding ways to engage profitably—from the European perspective—with Native Americans. The consequences of Indian encounters with European invaders has long been a principal feature of ethnohistorical research, but during the last long generation scholars of Native Americans in the South have increasingly viewed their subject in an Atlantic World context. With such scholarship as its foundation, the goal of the present volume is to bring together scholars with research linked to each of the three major European colonial powers to draw increased scholarly attention to the South as a significant arena of imperial ambition.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
New World ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early History ◽  
The South ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
The American South

The ‘Introduction’ provides an overview of the American South. Its early history illuminates the expansion of Europe into the New World, creating a colonial, plantation, slave society that made it different from other parts of the United States. Two broad geographical subdivisions anchor what became known as “the South”: an Uplands and a Lowlands. Ultimately, speaking of the South brings attention to the importance of regionalism in American history. Atlanta Olympics refurbished the South’s claim to a special southern hospitality, epitomizing such themes as race relations, economic development, and cultural expression that figure prominently in the larger story of the American South.

Lynching Beyond Dixie

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
The American South ◽  
Comprehensive History

In recent decades, scholars have explored much of the history of mob violence in the American South, especially in the years after Reconstruction. However, the lynching violence that occurred in American regions outside the South, where hundreds of persons, including Hispanics, whites, African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans died at the hands of lynch mobs, has received less attention. This book fills this gap by illuminating the factors that distinguished lynching in the West, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. The chapters compare the episodes and patterns of lynching in these regions with those that occurred in the South, placing the violence within a broader context of the development of American criminal justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It adds to a more comprehensive history of American lynching and will appeal to all readers interested in the history of violence across the varied regions of the United States.

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