Southern Railroad Leaders, 1865-1893: Identities and Ideologies

1968 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maury Klein

As the American South recovered from the Civil War, railroads and the businessmen who managed them were important ingredients in the process of economic change. But who were the railroad leaders of the first generation of the “New South” and what were their personal and corporate goals? What were the effects of their actions on the course of southern restoration? Sharply at odds with the usual “carpetbagger” demonology, Professor Klein suggests an alternative explanation and analysis.

Author(s):  
Diane Miller Sommerville

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.


Author(s):  
William A. Link

William Link introduces key contexts for the book, namely that the origins, onsets, and resolutions of the American Civil War are best understood as a global struggle. Not only was the creation of a new American nation a result of the war, but this creation also occurred in concert with a worldwide emergence of modern nationalism. By 1860, the American South contained the world’s largest and most valuable enslaved population, and the huge wealth in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco secured through slave labor is what drove exports, trade, and profit in American and global financial centers. This book suggests new ways to situate US Reconstruction as affecting and being affected by global events, and it argues that Reconstruction cannot be understood unless we extend our analysis beyond national borders.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-154
Author(s):  
Chin Yu Chen

There is a famous Chinese proverb which says “a good man never fights with a woman.” From the viewpoint of this Chinese custom, women should always be respected. This maxim certainly was never applied to Black women in the Ante-bellum south of the United States prior to the Civil War. The intent of this paper is to bring to the attention of the reader some of the inhumanity practiced on slave women when they were required to work, without pay, on the plantations in the American South before that country’s Civil War. The women learned quickly to “respect” the “lash” which beat them if they did not do their work properly, or sassed their master. Slavery, at its best, is a terrible institution, and this paper does not address the subject of slavery in other parts of the world. This study is designed to study the plight of Black women, and their struggles, in that time of supposed Southern “gentility.” This study will also attempt to provide an insight into the work and family life of Black women in the era of the Antebellum South.


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