In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America’s most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation. Dew re-creates the midcentury American South of his childhood--in many respects a boy’s paradise, but one stained by Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow. Through entertainments and "educational" books that belittled African Americans, as well as the living examples of his own family, Dew was indoctrinated in a white supremacy that, at best, was condescendingly paternalistic and, at worst, brutally intolerant. The fear that southern culture, and the "hallowed white male brotherhood," could come undone through the slightest flexibility in the color line gave the Jim Crow mindset its distinctly unyielding quality. Dew recalls his father, in most regards a decent man, becoming livid over a black tradesman daring to use the front, and not the back, door. The second half of the book shows how this former Confederate youth and descendant of Thomas Roderick Dew, one of slavery’s most passionate apologists, went on to reject his racist upbringing and become a scholar of the South and its deeply conflicted history. The centerpiece of Dew’s story is his sobering discovery of a price circular from 1860--an itemized list of humans up for sale. Contemplating this document becomes Dew’s first step in an exploration of antebellum Richmond’s slave trade that investigates the terrible--but, to its white participants, unremarkable--inhumanity inherent in the institution. Dew’s wish with this book is to show how the South of his childhood came into being, poisoning the minds even of honorable people, and to answer the question put to him by Illinois Browning Culver, the African American woman who devoted decades of her life to serving his family: "Charles, why do the grown-ups put so much hate in the children?
Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The fifteen years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.
A study of African-American workers empowered and partly liberated by their skills. At Buffalo Forge, an extensive ironmaking and farming enterprise in Virginia before the Civil War, a unique treasury of materials yields an "engrossing, often surprising record of everyday life on an estate in the antebellum South" (Kirkus Reviews).
In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America’s most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation. Dew re-creates the midcentury American South of his childhood--in many respects a boy’s paradise, but one stained by Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow. Through entertainments and "educational" books that belittled African Americans, as well as the living examples of his own family, Dew was indoctrinated in a white supremacy that, at best, was condescendingly paternalistic and, at worst, brutally intolerant. The fear that southern culture, and the "hallowed white male brotherhood," could come undone through the slightest flexibility in the color line gave the Jim Crow mindset its distinctly unyielding quality. Dew recalls his father, in most regards a decent man, becoming livid over a black tradesman daring to use the front, and not the back, door. The second half of the book shows how this former Confederate youth and descendant of Thomas Roderick Dew, one of slavery’s most passionate apologists, went on to reject his racist upbringing and become a scholar of the South and its deeply conflicted history. The centerpiece of Dew’s story is his sobering discovery of a price circular from 1860--an itemized list of humans up for sale. Contemplating this document becomes Dew’s first step in an exploration of antebellum Richmond’s slave trade that investigates the terrible--but, to its white participants, unremarkable--inhumanity inherent in the institution. Dew’s wish with this book is to show how the South of his childhood came into being, poisoning the minds even of honorable people, and to answer the question put to him by Illinois Browning Culver, the African American woman who devoted decades of her life to serving his family: "Charles, why do the grown-ups put so much hate in the children?
In the inflammatory rhetoric of state-appointed commissioners dispatched to preach the secessionist cause, Charles Dew finds what he maintains are the true causes of the Civil War and its legacy of racism in contemporary America.
A study of African-American workers empowered and partly liberated by their skills. At Buffalo Forge, an extensive ironmaking and farming enterprise in Virginia before the Civil War, a unique treasury of materials yields an "engrossing, often surprising record of everyday life on an estate in the antebellum South" (Kirkus Reviews).
Contains several questions and answers on the Coast Guard exams - 9,000 of them alongwith an interactive CD-ROM with 14,000 questions and answers in the USCG database. This book provides 400 pages of tutorials on seamanship and navigation.
Part of an eight-volume series providing short biographies of men and women from Roman to Victorian times, Who's Who in Stuart Britain is more than a work of reference: it is a book to read and enjoy.
“Brilliant . . . really gives one a sense of what it took to both lead and run an army in the Civil War. . . . Superb.” —Chris Kolakowski, author of The Virginia Campaigns: March–August 1862 In From Arlington to Appomattox, Charles Knight does for Robert E. Lee and students of the Civil War what E. B. Long’s Civil War Day by Day did for our understanding of the conflict as a whole. This is not another Lee biography, but it is every bit as valuable as one. We know Lee rode out to meet the survivors of Pickett’s Charge and accept blame for the defeat, that he tried to lead the Texas Brigade in a counterattack to save the day at the Wilderness, and took a tearful ride from Wilmer McLean’s house at Appomattox. But where was Lee and what was he doing when the spotlight of history failed to illuminate him? Focusing on what he was doing day by day offers an entirely different appreciation for Lee. Readers will come away with a fresh sense of his struggles, both personal and professional, and discover many things about Lee for the first time through his own correspondence and papers. From Arlington to Appomattox is a tremendous contribution to the literature of the Civil War. “Knight’s study will become the standard reference work on Lee’s daily wartime experiences.” —R. E. L. Krick, author of Staff Officers in Gray “A staggering work of scholarship.” —Jeffry D. Wert, author of A Glorious Army: Robert E. Lee’s Triumph, 1862–1863 "A pleasure to read.” —Michael C. Hardy, author of General Lee’s Immortals “Keeps the reader engaged.” —Journal of America's Military Past
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