In his compelling reinterpretation of American history, The Public and Its Possibilities, John Fairfieldargues that our unrealized civic aspirations provide the essential counterpoint to an excessive focus on private interests. Inspired by the revolutionary generation, nineteenth-century Americans struggled to build an economy and a culture to complement their republican institutions. But over the course of the twentieth century, a corporate economy and consumer culture undercut civic values, conflating consumer and citizen. Fairfield places the city at the center of American experience, describing how a resilient demand for an urban participatory democracy has bumped up against the fog of war, the allure of the marketplace, and persistent prejudices of race, class, and gender. In chronicling and synthesizing centuries of U.S. history—including the struggles of the antislavery, labor, women’s rights movements—Fairfield explores the ebb and flow of civic participation, activism, and democracy. He revisits what the public has done for civic activism, and the possibility of taking a greater role. In this age where there has been a move towards greater participation in America's public life from its citizens, Fairfield’s book—written in an accessible, jargon-free style and addressed to general readers—is especially topical.
A comprehensive biography of a dedicated civil rights activist and distinguished South Carolinian Civil rights activist, writer, theologian, preacher, and educator, Benjamin Elijah Mays (1894-1984) was one of the most distinguished South Carolinians of the twentieth century. He influenced the lives of generations of students as a dean and professor of religion at Howard University and as longtime president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. In addition to his personal achievements, Mays was also a mentor and teacher to Julian Bond, founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; future Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson; writer, preacher, and theologian Howard Washington Thurman; and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In this comprehensive biography of Mays, John Herbert Roper, Sr., chronicles the harsh realities of Mays's early life and career in the segregated South and crafts an inspirational, compelling portrait of one of the most influential African American intellectuals in modern history. Born at the turn of the century in rural Edgefield County, South Carolina, Mays was the youngest son of former slaves turned tenant farmers. At just four years of age, he experienced the brutal injustice of the Jim Crow era when he witnessed the bloody 1898 Phoenix Riot, sparked by black citizens' attempts to exercise their voting rights. In the early 1930s Mays discovered the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and traveled to India in 1938 to confer with him about his methods of nonviolent protest. An honoree of the South Carolina Hall of Fame and recipient of forty-nine honorary degrees, Mays strived tirelessly against racial prejudices and social injustices throughout his career. In addition to his contributions to education and theology, Mays also worked with the National Urban League to improve housing, employment, and health conditions for African Americans, and he played a major role in the integration of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). With honest appreciation and fervent admiration for Mays's many accomplishments and lasting legacy, Roper deftly captures the heart and passion of his subject, his lifelong quest for social equality, and his unwavering faith in the potential for good in the American people.
Introducing a New U.S. History Text That Takes Religion Seriously Unto a Good Land offers a distinctive narrative history of the American people -- from the first contacts between Europeans and North America's native inhabitants, through the creation of a modern nation, to the 2004 presidential election. Written by a team of highly regarded historians, this textbook shows how grasping the uniqueness of the "American experiment" depends on understanding not only social, cultural, political, and economic factors but also the role that religion has played in shaping U. S. history. While most United States history textbooks in recent decades have expanded their coverage of social and cultural history, they still tend to shortchange the role of religious ideas, practices, and movements in the American past. Unto a Good Land restores the balance by giving religion its appropriate place in the story. This readable and teachable text also features a full complement of maps, historical illustrations, and "In Their Own Words" sidebars with excerpts from primary source documents.
An Indian perspective into native and Euroamerican diplomacy in the South First published in 1939, McGillivray of the Creeks is a unique mix of primary and secondary sources for the study of American Indian history in the Southeast. The historian John Walton Caughey's brief but definitive biography of Creek leader Alexander McGillivray (1750-1793) is coupled with 214 letters between McGillivray and Spanish and American political officials. The volume offers distinctive firsthand insights into Creek and Euroamerican diplomacy in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi in the aftermath of the American Revolution as well as a glimpse into how historians have viewed the controversial Creek leader. McGillivray, the son of a famous Scottish Indian trader and a Muskogee Creek woman, was educated in Charleston, South Carolina, and, with his father's guidance, took up the mantle of negotiator for the Creek people during and after the Revolution. While much of eighteenth-century American Indian history relies on accounts written by non-Indians, the letters reprinted in this volume provide a valuable Indian perspective into Creek diplomatic negotiations with the Americans and the Spanish in the American South. Crafty and literate, McGillivray's letters reveal his willingness to play American and Spanish interests against one another. Whether he was motivated solely by a devotion to his native people or by the advancement of his own ambitions is the subject of much historical debate. In the new introduction to this Southern Classic edition, William J. Bauer, Jr., places Caughey's life into its historiographical context and surveys the various interpretations of the enigmatic McGillivray that historians have drawn from this material.
As its name suggests, the civil rights movement is an ongoing process, and the scholars contributing to this volume offer new geographical and temporal perspectives on this crucial American experience. As Clayborne Carson notes in the introduction, the movement involved much more than civil rights reform--it transformed African-American political and social consciousness. In this timely volume John Dittmer provides a new assessment of the effects of grass-roots activists of the movement in Mississippi from 1965 to 1968, to show what happened after the famous Freedom Summer of 1964. George C. Wright shows how African Americans in Kentucky from 1900 to 1970 faced the same racial restrictions and violence as blacks in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. W. Marvin Dulaney traces the rise and fall of the movement in Dallas from the 1930s through the 1970s while the nation's attention was focused elsewhere.
John Lutz traces Aboriginal people’s involvement in the new economy, and their displacement from it, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the 1970s. Drawing on an extensive array of oral histories, manuscripts, newspaper accounts, biographies, and statistical analysis, Lutz shows that Aboriginal people flocked to the workforce and prospered in the late nineteenth century. He argues that the roots of today’s widespread unemployment and “welfare dependency” date only from the 1950s, when deliberate and inadvertent policy choices – what Lutz terms the “white problem” drove Aboriginal people out of the capitalist, wage, and subsistence economies, offering them welfare as “compensation.”
The story of South Carolina's heartland told from the prospective of a founding father, a plantation mistress, an African-American politician, an editor, a mayor, and other local residents.
In this sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, historians John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov boldly trace the evolution of a modern social order. Combining a mastery of historical and political detail with a sophisticated theoretical frame, Jentz and Schneirov examine the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage worker class and the formation of an industrial upper class. Jentz and Schneirov demonstrate how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan production. The city's leading business interests were unable to stabilize their new system without the participation of the new working class, a German and Irish ethnic mix that included radical ideas transplanted from Europe. Jentz and Schneirov examine how debates over slave labor were transformed into debates over free labor as the city's wage-earning working class developed a distinctive culture and politics. The new social movements that arose in this era--labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen's municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and women's activism--constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and '70s. When the Depression of 1873 brought increased crime and financial panic, Chicago's new upper class developed municipal reform in an attempt to reassert its leadership. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of Reconstruction, Chicago in the Age of Capital vividly depicts the upheavals integral to building capitalism.
The Confiscation Acts were designed to sanction slave holding states by authorizing the Federal Government to seize rebel properties and grant freedom to slaves who fought with or worked for the Confederate military. In the first full account in more than twenty years of them, John Syrett examines the political contexts of the Acts, especially the debates in Congress, and demonstrates how the failure of the confiscation acts during the war presaged the political and structural shortcomings of Reconstruction after the war.
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