Books in the New Studies in Southern History series

This book chronicles the history of movie censorship in Virginia from the 1920s to 1960s. At its most basic level, it analyzes the project of state film censorship in Virginia. It uses the contestations surrounding film censorship as a framework for more fully understanding the dominant political, economic, and cultural hierarchies that structured Virginia and much of the New South in the mid-twentieth century and ways in which citizens contested these prevailing structures. This study highlights the centrality of gendered and racialized discourses in the debates over the movies and the broader regulatory power of the state. It particularly emphasizes ways in which issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality framed debates over popular culture in the South. It ties the regulation of racial and sexual boundaries in other areas such as public facilities, schools, public transportation, the voting booth, and residential housing to ways in which censors regulated those same boundaries in popular culture. This book shows how the same racialized and gendered social norms and legal codes that placed audience members in different theater spaces also informed ways in which what they viewed on-screen had been mediated by state officials. Ultimately, this study shows how Virginia's officials attempted to use the project of film censorship as the cultural arm of regulation to further buttress the state's political and economic hierarchies of the time period and the ways in various citizens and community groups supported and challenged these hierarchies across the censorship board's forty-three-year history.

In Race and Masculinity in Southern Memory Matthew Mace Barbee explores the long history of Richmond, Virginia's iconic Monument Avenue. As a network of important memorials to Confederate leaders located in the former capitol of the Confederacy, Monument Avenue has long been central to the formation of public memory in Virginia and the U.S. South. It has also been a site of multiple controversies over what, who, and how Richmond's past should be commemorated. This book traces the evolution of Monument Avenue by analyzing public discussions of its memorials and their meaning. It pays close attention to the origins of Monument Avenue and the first statues erected there, including memorials to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Barbee provides a detailed and focused analysis of the evolution of Monument Avenue and public memory in Richmond from 1948 to 1996 through the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil War Centennial, and up to the memorial to Arthur Ashe erected in 1996. An African-American native of Richmond, Ashe was an international tennis champion and advocate for human rights. The story of how a monument to him ended up in a space previously reserved for statues of Confederate leaders helps us understand the ways Richmond has grappled with its past, especially the histories of slavery, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights.

Even before the end of Reconstruction in Arkansas, the state already possessed a long-standing reputation for violence, including lynchings, duels, and feuds. However, the years following Reconstruction witnessed the creation of new forms of mob violence. All across the state, gangs of whites sought to drive African Americans from their homes, their jobs, and their positions of authority, creating communities shamelessly advertised as ';100% white.' This happened not only in the highland regions, the Ozarks and the Ouachitas, where the expulsion of African Americans created so-called ';sundown towns,' but it also occurred in the low-lying Delta lands of eastern Arkansas, where cotton was king and where masked mobs of landless ';whitecappers' and ';nightriders' regularly dealt terror and murder to black sharecroppers.Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 18831924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality by Guy Lancaster is the first book to examine the phenomenon of racial cleansing within the context of one particular state, illustrating how violence relates to geography and economic development. Lancaster analyzes the wholesale expulsion of African Americans and the emergence of ';sundown towns' together with a survey of more limited deportations, including those with blatant political goals as well as vigilante violence. The book has broader implications not only for the study of Southern and American history but also for a deeper understanding of ethnic and racial conflict, local politics, and labor history

The focus of this work is a reconstruction of the life and career of an Ulster-Scot fur trader, George Galphin (pronounced Golfin), who immigrated to South Carolina in the colonial period. The thesis of this work is that his life and career helped to shape the history of the backcountry of Georgia and South Carolina in three distinct ways. First, his support of a ';for profit' Indian trade (as opposed to a ';for stability trade') shaped Anglo-Indian relations between frontier settlers and their Indian neighbors. Ultimately, men like Galphin helped the United States move away from the British policy towards Native Americans in favor of a uniquely American policy which ran the gamut from exploitation to land seizures and finally toward Indian Removal itself. The book involves a look at the histories of the Muskogee Creeks and Cherokees who were his clients and has a heavy Native American component. Galphin's second major influence on the Southeast came with the creation of the Ulster-Scot communities he sponsored in both South Carolina and Georgia. The relocation plans catered strictly to the Scots-Irish Protestants and located them in ';danger zones' between coastal settlements of Anglo-Saxon British settlers and the Indian frontiers of the two colonies.Galphin's third major influence came during the American Revolution when he was appointed as a Patriot Indian Commissioner fighting to control the southeastern tribes and keep them out of the war. In that role, he made his contribution, as did so many others, that helped secure a Patriot victory. This part of his story would be of note to an audience interested in the American Revolution in the South from the perspective of the backcountry. Finally, his family life included the creation of a large, multi-racial family which helped establish the Creole society of the Eastern Georgia/Western South Carolina. His spouses and children included Caucasians, Native Americans, and African-Americans. Two of Galphins daughters were his slaves until his death.

This book investigates the social, architectural, and environmental history of sporting plantations in the South Carolina lowcountry and the Red Hills region of southeast Georgia and northern Florida. By examining the two largest collections of sporting plantations in the New South, it explores questions about environmental change, recreation, race relations, and historical memory of slavery during the first half of the twentieth century.

This book investigates the social, architectural, and environmental history of sporting plantations in the South Carolina lowcountry and the Red Hills region of southeast Georgia and northern Florida. It explores questions about environmental change, recreation, race relations, and historical memory of slavery.

This cultural history provides an examination of the Federal Theatre Project in the American South during the New Deal era. It analyzes the role of racial segregation and conservative politics, how the project drew from distinct regional heritages, and how it shaped successive generations' debates over government, art, and cultural expression.

This book examines the history of southern public libraries' development from 1898-1963. It analyzes their role in institutionalizing segregation, their complex and protracted efforts to integrate these institutions, and their post-integration attempts to deal with the consequences of having practiced segregation.

This study examines how slaves in antebellum Virginia, through physical confrontations with whites, fought to reassert some measure of control over their day-today lives. The author analyzes how while this violence came at a high cost, it also ensured the preservation of their humanity and set limits on their enslavement.

This book includes both the story of slave trader William James Smith and an examination in microcosm of the domestic slave trade in the South's hinterland. The authors provide insight into the life and business of William James Smith to analyze the interior slave trade and characterizations of slave traders.