Southern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1877-1906
Edward L. Ayers
Abstract
This book represents an abridgement of previous work, Promise of the New South, which tells the history of the American South between the 1870s and the 1900s. It offers a glimpse into a society undergoing the sudden confrontation with the promises, costs, and consequences of modern life. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee Mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, the book depicts a land of startling contrasts—a time of progress and repression, of new industries and old ways. It takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the st ... More
This book represents an abridgement of previous work, Promise of the New South, which tells the history of the American South between the 1870s and the 1900s. It offers a glimpse into a society undergoing the sudden confrontation with the promises, costs, and consequences of modern life. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee Mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, the book depicts a land of startling contrasts—a time of progress and repression, of new industries and old ways. It takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic “Redeemers” swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. It explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Here is the local Baptist congregation, the country store, the tobacco-stained second-class railroad car, the rise of Populism. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crow laws and disenfranchisement. The book weaves all these details into the contradictory story of the New South, showing how the region developed the patterns it was to follow for the next fifty years.
Keywords:
American South,
modern life,
Democratic Redeemers,
Reconstruction,
prohibitionists,
race relations
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 1996 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195086898 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195086898.001.0001 |
