In August 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner led a bloody uprising that took the lives of some fifty-five white people—men, women, and children—shocking the South. Nearly as many black people, all told, perished in the rebellion and its aftermath. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County presents important new evidence about the violence and the community in which it took place, shedding light on the insurgents and victims and reinterpreting the most important account of that event, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Drawing upon largely untapped sources, David F. Allmendinger Jr. reconstructs the lives of key individuals who were drawn into the uprising and shows how the history of certain white families and their slaves—reaching back into the eighteenth century—shaped the course of the rebellion. Never before has anyone so patiently examined the extensive private and public sources relating to Southampton as does Allmendinger in this remarkable work. He argues that the plan of rebellion originated in the mind of a single individual, Nat Turner, who concluded between 1822 and 1826 that his own masters intended to continue holding slaves into the next generation. Turner specifically chose to attack households to which he and his followers had connections. The book also offers a close analysis of his Confessions and the influence of Thomas R. Gray, who wrote down the original text in November 1831. Allmendinger draws new conclusions about Turner and Gray, their different motives, the authenticity of the confession, and the introduction of terror as a tactic, both in the rebellion and in its most revealing document. Students of slavery, the Old South, and African American history will find in Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County an outstanding example of painstaking research and imaginative family and community history. "The exhaustive research Allmendinger presents greatly enriches our historical understanding of the Southampton Rebellion through the eyes of its key victims. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County reveals important dimensions of the rebellion's local history and contextualizes the event, as Nat Turner did, within the context of slavery in Southampton County."—Reviews in History "Allmendinger’s great achievement is that he made full use of ‘new’ primary sources related to the uprising of 1831—new sources hitherto hidden in plain sight. Most importantly, he understood the significance of this material and knew exactly how to mine it for valuable new insights into virtually every aspect of Nat Turner’s rebellion."—Reviews in American History "No one has done more to corroborate and sync the details, nor to illuminate Turner’s inspirations and goals. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County is a model of historical methodology, and goes further than any other previous work in helping readers understand Turner’s motives and meaning."—African American Intellectual History Society "We are all in David Allmendinger's debt for the labor of research that has given The Rising in Southampton County its absent material context."—Law and History Review "Though the subject of countless histories, novels, videos, and websites, Nat Turner, the leader of the largest slave insurrection in U.S. history, remains an enigma; yet, in this new and challenging study, the life and times of the legendary revolutionary come into much better focus. A must-read for historians of slave resistance and all others interested in the history of antebellum Virginia and in particular Southampton County."—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society "Allmendinger approaches a well-trodden historical event from a distinctive perspective. [He] provides the most complete historical context surrounding the rebellion. Ultimately, Allmendinger succeeds in providing a more complete understanding of the community of Southampton, Virginia, and offers a better explanation for the motivations that led Turner and his followers down such a bloody path in 1831."—Choice David F. Allmendinger Jr. is professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England and Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South.
A masterful study of one of the bloodiest slave rebellions in the history of the Old South. In August 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner led a bloody uprising that took the lives of some fifty-five white people—men, women, and children—shocking the South. Nearly as many black people, all told, perished in the rebellion and its aftermath. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County presents important new evidence about the violence and the community in which it took place, shedding light on the insurgents and victims and reinterpreting the most important account of that event, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Drawing upon largely untapped sources, David F. Allmendinger Jr. reconstructs the lives of key individuals who were drawn into the uprising and shows how the history of certain white families and their slaves—reaching back into the eighteenth century—shaped the course of the rebellion. Never before has anyone so patiently examined the extensive private and public sources relating to Southampton as does Allmendinger in this remarkable work. He argues that the plan of rebellion originated in the mind of a single individual, Nat Turner, who concluded between 1822 and 1826 that his own masters intended to continue holding slaves into the next generation. Turner specifically chose to attack households to which he and his followers had connections. The book also offers a close analysis of his Confessions and the influence of Thomas R. Gray, who wrote down the original text in November 1831. The author draws new conclusions about Turner and Gray, their different motives, the authenticity of the confession, and the introduction of terror as a tactic, both in the rebellion and in its most revealing document. Students of slavery, the Old South, and African American history will find in Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County an outstanding example of painstaking research and imaginative family and community history.
The troubled history of higher education in Mississippi is a mirror image of the cultural and political dynamics that have shaped the state's history over the last two centuries. The interaction between race and place, the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, illiteracy and literary genius, the conflict and change and continuity that mark the contours of its history, have influenced the development of higher education in Mississippi. In this study of the origin and evolution of the state's collegiate system, David Sansing examines higher education in its broad cultural context and its elaborate involvement with the rest of society. Although he focuses on one southern state, he links the growth of higher education in Mississippi to both regional and national developments. Sansing also contrasts the strong popular support for higher education with the general neglect of public schools, a longstanding tradition in Mississippi that dates from the pre-Civil War period. From the antebellum artisans and the sharecroppers of the Gilded Age, to the redneck farmers of the debt-ridden twenties and post-World War II blacks with their rising expectations, Mississippians have struggled and sacrificed to send their children to college as a way up and out of poverty. Sansing's history of higher education in Mississippi is the first such study since 1899 and is the most recent of the five modern state histories of higher education. This path-breaking study traces the gradual and often controversial expansion of Mississippi's institutions of higher learning from the founding of Jefferson College in 1802, through the sectional crisis and Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the Bilbo Purge, World War II, the Meredith Crisis, and Civil Rights Revolution.
A statue of Horace Mann, erected in front of the Boston State House in 1863, declares him the "Father of the American Public School System." For over a century and a half, most narratives about early American education have taken this epithet as the truth. As Mann looms over the Boston Common, so he has also loomed over discussions of early American schooling. Other scholarship has emphasized economic factors as the main reason for the emergence of public schools. The Common School Awakening offers a new narrative about the rise of public schools in America that counters these conceptions. In this book, David Komline explains how a broad and distinctly American religious consensus emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, allowing people from across the religious spectrum to cooperate in systematizing and professionalizing America's schools in an effort to Christianize the country. At the height of this movement, several states introduced state-sponsored teacher training colleges and concentrated government oversight of schools in offices such as the one held by Mann. Shortly thereafter, the religious consensus that had served as the foundation for this common school system disintegrated. But the system itself remained, the legacy of not just one man, but of a whole network of reformers who put into motion a transatlantic and transdenominational religious movement - the "Common School Awakening.
Updated edition: “A balanced economic, social, political, and technological history of rural America . . . A splendid book, rich with detail.” —Agricultural History Review Through most of its history, America has been a rural nation, largely made up of farmers. David B. Danbom’s Born in the Country was the first—and is still the only—general history of rural America. Ranging from pre-Columbian times to the enormous changes of the twentieth century, the book masterfully integrates agricultural, technological, and economic themes with new questions about the American experience. Danbom employs the stories of particular farm families to illustrate the experiences of rural people. This substantially revised and updated third edition: • expands and deepens its coverage of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries • focuses on the changes in agriculture and rural life in the progressive and New Deal eras as well as the massive shifts that have taken place since 1945 • adds new information about African American and Native American agricultural experiences • discusses the decline of agriculture as a productive enterprise and its impact on farm families and communities • explores rural culture, gender issues, agriculture, and the environment • traces the relationship among farmers, agribusiness, and consumers In a new and provocative concluding chapter, Danbom reflects on increasing consumer disenchantment with and resistance to modern agriculture as well as the transformation of rural America into a place where farmers are a shrinking minority. Ultimately, he asks whether a distinctive style of rural life exists any longer in the United States. “A delightful story tracing the social history of U.S. farmers. The book details the attitudes and social life of farm people?how they looked at themselves and how the rest of society saw them.” —Forum
John Humphrey Noyes, founder of utopian communities in Putney, Vermont, and Oneida, New York, remain one of the most enigmatic reformers of the nineteenth century. The last biography, written over forty years ago, portrayed Noyes as a "Yankee Saint," a man of progressive ideas and religious vision. Yet he has also been called a "Vermont Casanova" whose elaborate theology of Perfection is simply justified the license he took with the women in his communities. Robert David Thomas makes a convincing case that Noyes, though riven by conflict and full of contradictions, had his finger on the social and cultural problems that were bothering a great many Americans of his time. Studied out of context, Noyes must remain a mystery-radical yet conservative, shy yet arrogant, retiring, and passive yet forceful, even oppressive, in his leadership. But against the background of nineteenth-century American activism and religious enthusiasm, John Humphrey Noyes emerges as a man who overcame a tortured personal life and marshaled his inner resources to grapple with a confusing and rapidly changing social world. Using modern theories of the ego, Thomas provides a psychologically consistent portrait of Noyes and therein a new perspective on the roots of nineteenth-century Perfectionism, utopian, reform, sexual ideology, and family theory. More than a conventional psycho-biography, this study assumes a sociological theme in its explanations of the social tensions of the era and the sources of "disorder" now so frequently mentioned in studies of the previous century.
Now available in paperback, this award-winning book provides a comprehensive history of gender policies and practices in American public schools. David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot explore the many factors that have shaped coeducation since its origins. At the very time that Americans were creating separate spheres for adult men and women, they institutionalized an education system that brought boys and girls together. How did beliefs about the similarities and differences of boys and girls shape policy and practice in schools? To what degree did the treatment of boys and girls differ by class, race, region, and historical period? Debates over gender policies suggest that American have made public education the repository of their hopes and anxieties about relationships between the sexes. Thus, the history of coeducation serves as a window not only on constancy and change in gender practices in the schools but also on cultural conflicts about gender in the broader society. "Learning Together presents a rich and exhaustive search through [the] 'tangled history' of gender and education that links both the silences and the debates surrounding coeducation to the changing roles of women and men in our society....It is the generosity and capaciousness of Tyack and Hansot's scholarship that makes Learning Together so important a book." —Science
The Self-Liberation of Parson Sykes is a documentary novel based on a true story and actual events and was drawn from a variety of historic sources, including published government materials and family chronicles. A trilogy, the story profiles Private Parson Sykes’ evolution from enslavement in Southampton County, Virginia, followed by his enlistment into the Union Army, and culminating with his emancipation and return to the county. The initial part subtitled, Enslavement in Southampton County Virginia, of the trilogy, takes place in 1864 near the end of the American Civil War on the slave-holding Jacob Williams’ middle class family farm in Southampton County Virginia. During the 1831 Southampton Insurrection, the farm came under attack by Nat Turner and his insurgents, which haunts Jacob. Before the Civil War started, Parson began discussing human rights and the political implications of the abolition of slavery with his two brothers. In December 1864, he planned to liberate himself by running away from Jacob Williams’ farm and following an eastward path along the Seaboard and Roanoke Railroad to reach Norfolk, Virginia, which was a Union occupied city. Upon reaching Norfolk and in the hands of Union troops, Parson had liberated himself from bondage. The Self-Liberation of Parson Sykes also functions to draw attention to the important role Black soldiers and their White officers played during the Civil War as members of United States Colored Troops (USCT). Though less heralded, the USCT regiments were the precursors to Black army units famously nicknamed as the Buffalo Soldiers., Smoked Yankees, the Harlem Hell Fighters, Tuskegee Airmen, and the Red Ball Express.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.