Books in the Cambridge Studies on the American South series

The 1898 lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer is retold in this groundbreaking book. Unlike other histories of lynching that rely on conventional historical records, this study focuses on the objects associated with the lynching, including newspaper articles, fragments of the victims' clothing, photographs, and souvenirs such as sticks from the hanging tree. This material culture approach uncovers how people tried to integrate the meaning of the lynching into their everyday lives through objects. These seemingly ordinary items are repositories for the comprehension, interpretation, and commemoration of racial violence and white supremacy. Elijah Gaddis showcases an approach to objects as materials of history and memory, insisting that we live in a world suffused with the material traces of racial violence, past and present.

Taking a continental approach, Freedom Seekers introduces a new conceptualization of 'spaces of freedom' in North America, revealing the diversity of slave fight by dividing the continent into three distinct (and continuously evolving) spaces. An essential study for students of African-American history and the American South.

Challenges historical models of black solidarity and reveals how resistance, accommodation, and survival in slavery was shaped by gender, as well as how gendered values were embedded in the structures of enslavement. For students and scholars of American history with interest in slavery, gender, and race.

Focuses on the wartime struggle over resources between armies and civilians during the US Civil War. These resources included food, timber, shelter, and the skill and knowledge of the white population. Also addresses the political divisions inside the Confederacy and the inaccurate public memory of the conflict.

Examines the transformation of architecture and landscape involved in the making of 'sporting plantations' in coastal South Carolina by wealthy sporting enthusiasts. Vivian explores the meaning of plantations in American culture, how new sporting estates affected historical memory of slavery, and the consequences for contemporary views of the South Carolina coast and its past.

Lawrence T. McDonnell examines how ordinary men took practical steps at ground level to make secession happen in the American South. Using Charleston, South Carolina as the epicenter of his research and analysis, McDonnell examines the Minutemen in historical context, exploring the political and cultural dynamics of their choices.

Owning neither land nor slaves, poor whites comprised about a third of the American South's white population in 1860. Focusing on land, labor, and legal history, Masterless Men shows what happens to excess workers in a slave society.

A new take on the origins of the Southern Literary Renaissance, Reviewing the South shows how book reviewing played a vital role in shaping an image of the South in the American national consciousness during the interwar years.

Renowned historian Donald G. Mathews offers a new interpretation of the lynching of Sam Hose, framing it as a religious and moral story within the culture of deeply-religious communities in the Jim Crow South. This book will appeal to those studying southern history, African American history, and Southern religion.

American slaveholders used the wealth and leisure that slave labor provided to cultivate lives of gentility and refinement. This study provides a vivid portrait of slaveholders at home and at play as they built a tragic world of both 'sweetness' and slavery.

This book tells the story of African Americans' evolving attitudes towards lynching from the 1880s to the present. Unlike most histories of lynching, it explains how African Americans were both purveyors and victims of lynch mob violence and how this dynamic has shaped the meaning of lynching in black culture.

This historical study shows how the peach emerged as a viable commodity precisely when the South was desperate for an improved reputation. The book joins a renaissance in writing about the food, agriculture, and environment of the American South.

This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective. It analyzes how different migrant groups anticipated, reacted to, and experienced forced removal, as well as how they adapted to their new homes.

This book sheds new light on the role of religion in the nineteenth-century slavery debates. Luke E. Harlow argues that the ongoing conflict over the meaning of Christian 'orthodoxy' constrained the political and cultural horizons available for defenders and opponents of American slavery.

This book examines the political economy of the master-slave relationship viewed through the lens of consumption and market exchange. What did it mean when human chattel bought commodities, 'stole' property, or gave and received gifts? Forgotten exchanges, this study argues, measured the deepest questions of worth and value, shaping an enduring struggle for power between slaves and masters.

New Orleans, the nineteenth-century South's only true metropolis, originally derived its prosperity as the chief export point for slave-produced commodities, most notably cotton. This book focuses on the city's merchants and how their conservative investment mentalities contributed to New Orleans' unusually rapid economic downfall during and after the Civil War.

This book describes Thomas Jefferson as the essential teller of what he once called the 'American Story' and argues that his confidence about America's greatness was rooted less in his famously cosmic optimism and more in his extensive empirical assessment of American character.

This book explores the relationship between freedom and slavery in the antebellum American South, studying authors who spoke for the Southwest's educated classes but often reached national readerships. Instead of treating freedom as an abstraction, this book analyzes the practical meanings attached to liberty by people who treasured it, even as they defended slavery.

Examines perceptions of the natural world revealed by the religious ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina from the colonial period into the twentieth century. Focusing on Kongo nature spirits known as the simbi, Ras Michael Brown describes the essential role religion played in key historical processes.

This book explores how Virginia was transformed from a British colony into a Southern slave state. It details how the traditional principles of land tenure were subverted by economic and political changes, and how they fostered law reforms where slavery replaced land ownership as the distinguishing basis for political power.

This is the first book to examine women writers in the nineteenth-century South. While popular myths depict the shy and quiet Southern belle, this book demonstrates that Southern women were often politically active and outspoken, and calls into question widespread assumptions about the nineteenth-century South.

In 1776, the Carolina lowcountry was the wealthiest and unhealthiest region in British North America. Professor McCandless argues that the two were intimately connected, examining how people created, combated, avoided and denied disease; and how disease and human responses to it influenced the region, the South and the United States.

Recounts efforts of 'proslavery nationalists' to navigate the nineteenth-century geopolitics of imperialism, federalism, and nationalism and to articulate themes of American mission in overtly proslavery terms.

Jewell writes the first history of the Southern States Industrial Council (SSIC), which charts its transformation as a regional business interest to a key player in the South's dramatic political realignment in the post-1945 era from 'Solid South' to conservative Republican stronghold.

This book examines Southerners' claims to loyal citizenship in the reunited nation after the American Civil War. Southerners - male and female; elite and non-elite; white, black, and American Indian - disagreed with the federal government over the obligations citizens owed to their nation and the obligations the nation owed to its citizens.

Could Jefferson claim any consistency in his advocacy of democracy and the rights of man while remaining one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia? This extensive study of Jefferson's intellectual outlook suggests that, once we fully acknowledge the premises of his ethical thought and his now outdated scientific views, he could. Jefferson famously thought the human mind to be 'susceptible of much improvement ... most of all, in matters of government and religion'. Ari Helo's thorough analysis of Jefferson's understanding of Christian morality, atheism, contemporary theories of moral sentiments, ancient virtue ethics, natural rights, and the principles of justice and benevolence suggests that Jefferson refused to be a philosopher, and did so for moral reasons. This book finds Jefferson profoundly political in his understanding of individual moral responsibility and human progress.

This book explores changes in rural households of the Georgia Piedmont through the material culture of farmers as they transitioned from self-sufficiency to market dependence. The period between 1880 and 1910 was a time of dynamic change when Southern farmers struggled to reinvent their lives and livelihoods. Relying on primary documents, including probate inventories, tax lists, state and federal census data, and estate sale results, this study seeks to understand the variables that prompted farm households to assume greater risk in hopes of success as well as those factors that stood in the way of progress. While there are few projects of this type for the late nineteenth century, and fewer still for the New South, the findings challenge the notion of farmers as overly conservative consumers and call into question traditional views of conspicuous consumption as a key indicator of wealth and status.

This book examines the environmental and technological complexity of South Carolina inland rice plantations from their inception at the turn of the seventeenth century to the brink of their institutional collapse at the eve of the Civil War.