This collection of essays examines the development of the American South from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War II. Written by both well-known and emerging scholars, the essays are divided into sections that address some of the major issues of that era, such as race relations, economic development, political reform, the roles of southern women, the messages of folk music, and the problems of the region's historians. Each article offers fresh insights or new information on its subject, and collectively the articles help to illuminate how the most traditional of American regions tried to cope with the forces of modernization.
Tulane is the story of a southern school striving for national recognition in the post–World War II era of American research universities. Clarence L. Mohr and Joseph E. Gordon pre-sent a candid, in-depth treatment of the 150-year-old New Orleans institution during this transformative period, when it grappled with such pervasive issues as federal and private funding; academic freedom; an enrollment surge set in motion by the GI Bill and sustained by the postwar “baby boom”; the cold war; desegregation; the antiwar, civil rights, and student-power movements; expanding intercollegiate athletics; censorship; the clash between liberal and utilitarian conceptions of higher learning; revision of curricular content; and the role of universities as platforms for social criticism—all of which together profoundly altered the mission of American higher learning. In addition to these external forces, the authors examine the many individuals—administrators, professors, and students—whose responses in both calm and crises shaped the evolution of Tulane’s unique academic, physical, and demographic design. Like its regional peers in the 1950s and 1960s, Tulane faced the challenge of transcending its past without repudiating traditions of lasting value. From a loose confederation of locally oriented undergraduate and professional schools, it developed into a nationally focused research university serving a diverse student body selected through rigorous admissions standards. Its journey over the past half century should remind those who support, study, or teach in American universities that their own institutions during that period have in a very real sense made history as well.
Reidy has produced one of the most thoughtful treatments to date of a critical moment in southern history, placing the social transformation of the South in the context of 'the age of capital' and the changes in the markets, ideologies, etc. of the Atlantic world system. Better than anyone perhaps, Reidy has elaborated both the large and small narratives of this development, connecting global forces with the initiatives and reactions of ordinary southerners, black and white.--Thomas C. Holt, University of Chicago "Joseph Reidy's detailed analysis of social and economic developments in central Georgia during and after slavery will take its place among the standard works on these subjects. Its discussions of the expansion of the cotton kingdom and of the changes after emancipation make it necessary reading for all concerned with southern and African-American history.--Stanley Engerman, University of Rochester "Successfully places the experience of one region's people into the larger theoretical context of world capitalist development and in the process challenges other scholars to do the same.--Rural Sociology
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