Sydney Nathans's Books

A Mind to Stay

White Plantation, Black Homeland

By: Sydney Nathans

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A Mind to Stay

White Plantation, Black Homeland

By: Sydney Nathans

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Prologue: Unexpected -- Part One: Proving Ground -- 1. Spared -- 2. "Emigrants" -- 3. "A Place Perfectly Detested" -- 4. Held Back -- 5. Reversals -- Part Two: A Foothold in Freedom -- 6. Exile's Return -- 7. "Against All Comers" -- 8. "If They Can Get the Land" -- Part Three: Beyond a Living -- 9. "Hallelujah Times" -- 10. "A Game Rooster" -- 11. Sanctuaries -- Part Four: Heir Land -- 12. "That Thirties Wreck" -- 13. New Foundations -- 14. "Unless It's a Must" -- Epilogue: "A Heavy Load to Lift" -- Appendix: The People of A Mind to Stay -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index -- Photographs

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342

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ISBN 10

0674977882

ISBN 13

9780674977884

A Mind to Stay

White Plantation, Black Homeland

By: Sydney Nathans

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A Mind to Stay

White Plantation, Black Homeland

By: Sydney Nathans

The exodus of millions of African Americans from the rural South is a central theme of black life and liberation in the twentieth century. A Mind to Stay offers a counterpoint to the narrative of the Great Migration. Sydney Nathans tells the rare story of people who moved from being enslaved to becoming owners of the very land they had worked in bondage, and who have held on to it from emancipation through the Civil Rights era. The story began in 1844, when North Carolina planter Paul Cameron bought 1,600 acres near Greensboro, Alabama, and sent out 114 enslaved people to cultivate cotton and enlarge his fortune. In the 1870s, he sold the plantation to emancipated black families who worked there. Drawing on thousands of letters from the planter and on interviews with descendants of those who bought the land, Nathans unravels how and why the planter’s former laborers purchased the site of their enslavement, kept its name as Cameron Place, and defended their homeland against challengers from the Jim Crow era to the present day. Through the prism of a single plantation and the destiny of black families that dwelt on it for over a century and a half, A Mind to Stay brings to life a vivid cast of characters and illuminates the changing meaning of land and landowning to successive generations of rural African Americans. Those who remained fought to make their lives fully free—for themselves, for their neighbors, and for those who might someday return.

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342

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674977890

ISBN 13

9780674977891

Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy

By: Sydney Nathans

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Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy

By: Sydney Nathans

Originally published in 1973. Professor Nathans illuminates the changes wrought by Jacksonian democracy on the career of Daniel Webster, a major political figure, and on the destiny of a major political party, the Whigs. Daniel Webster was a creative anachronism in the Jacksonian era. His career illustrates the fate of a generation of American politicians, reared to rule in a traditional world of defined social classes where gentlemen led and the masses followed. With extensive research into primary sources, Nathans interprets Webster as a leader in the older political tradition, hostile to permanent organized political parties and fearful of social strife that party conflict seemed to promote. He focuses on Webster's response to the rise of entrenchment of voter-oriented partisan politics. He analyzes Webster's struggle to survive, comprehend, and finally manipulate the new politics during his early opposition to Jackson; his roles in the Bank War and the nullification crisis; and the contest for leadership within the Whig Party from 1828 to 1844. Webster and the Whigs resisted and then belatedly attempted to answer the demands of the new egalitarian mass politics. When Webster failed as an apologist for government by the elite, he became a rhapsodist of American commercial enterprise. Seeking a new power base, he adapted his public style to the standards of simplicity and humility that the voters seemed to reward. Nathans shows, however, that Webster developed a realistic vision of the common bonds of Jacksonian society—of the basis for community—that would warrant anew the trust needed for the kind of leadership he offered. The meaning of Webster's career lies in these attempts to bridge the old and new politics, but his attempt was doomed to ironic and revealing failure. Nathans studies Webster's impact on the Whig party, showing that his influence was strong enough to thwart the ambitions of his rivals Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun but not strong enough to achieve his own aspirations. Nathans argues that Webster, through his efforts to increase his authority within the party, merely revealed his true weakness as a sectional leader. His successful blocking of Clay and Calhoun brought about a deadlock that significantly hastened the transfer of power to men more committed to strong party organization and more talented at voter manipulation. Webster's dilemma was the crisis of an entire political generation reared for a traditional world and forced to function in a modern one.

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312

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1421430932

ISBN 13

9781421430935

To Free a Family

The Journey of Mary Walker

By: Sydney Nathans

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To Free a Family

The Journey of Mary Walker

By: Sydney Nathans

What was it like for a mother to flee slavery, leaving her children behind? To Free a Family tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years trying to recover her family. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price—remorse at parting without a word, fear for her family’s fate. This story is anchored in two extraordinary collections of letters and diaries, that of her former North Carolina slaveholders and that of the northern family—Susan and Peter Lesley—who protected and employed her. Sydney Nathans’s sensitive and penetrating narrative reveals Mary Walker’s remarkable persistence as well as the sustained collaboration of black and white abolitionists who assisted her. Mary Walker and the Lesleys ventured half a dozen attempts at liberation, from ransom to ruse to rescue, until the end of the Civil War reunited Mary Walker with her son and daughter. Unlike her more famous counterparts—Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth—who wrote their own narratives and whose public defiance made them heroines, Mary Walker’s efforts were protracted, wrenching, and private. Her odyssey was more representative of women refugees from bondage who labored secretly and behind the scenes to reclaim their families from the South. In recreating Mary Walker’s journey, To Free a Family gives voice to their hidden epic of emancipation and to an untold story of the Civil War era.

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262

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

067426620X

ISBN 13

9780674266209

To Free a Family

The Journey of Mary Walker

By: Sydney Nathans

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To Free a Family

The Journey of Mary Walker

By: Sydney Nathans

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262

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Harvard University Press

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ISBN 10

067426620X

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9780674266209

Freedom's Mirage

Virgil Bennehan's Odyssey from Emancipation to Exile

By: Sydney Nathans

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Freedom's Mirage

Virgil Bennehan's Odyssey from Emancipation to Exile

By: Sydney Nathans

Freedom's Mirage traces the exceptional life of Virgil Bennehan, born in bondage in 1808 in Piedmont North Carolina, who rose to become an enslaved doctor on one of the South's largest plantations and to view himself as a friend to Blacks and whites alike. Emancipated in 1848 but required to leave the state to be free, he was sent to Liberia. Though richly endowed and royally welcomed, he found himself subject to new rulers and mired in the worst medical catastrophe in Liberian history. Recrossing the Atlantic, he boldly returned to North Carolina to warn slave owners that Liberia was a death trap. Yet again exiled from his native state, he declared in March 1849 his intention to go to gold-rush California, the one place at midcentury that seemed to offer an open field, even to a man of color. Intrepidly researched and grippingly told, Virgil Bennehan's story reveals the complexity and fragility of human relationships within bondage. Once liberated, Bennehan led a tumultuous life that dramatized the fleeting promise and pervasive limits of Black freedom in the era of slavery--and foreshadowed the future for generations that followed.

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ISBN 10

1469682656

ISBN 13

9781469682655

The Quest for Progress

The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1870-1920

By: Sydney Nathans

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The Quest for Progress

The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1870-1920

By: Sydney Nathans

Few would have guessed in 1870 that within fifty years North Carolina would be the most industrialized state in the South. The Quest for Progress recounts that half-century of turbulent change and growth. It is the fourth volume in The Way We Lived in North Carolina, a pioneering series that uses historic places as windows to the past. An accelerating pace of life was evident everywhere in North Carolina at the turn of the century, from mill villages to mushrooming towns. Sky scrapers and suburbs, country estates and mountain resorts testified to the state's new wealth. But new conflicts marked the era as well. Farmers plagued by debt fought back in a Populist movement that carried its cause to the nation. Working men and women fought to keep their independence on the factory floor. Black North Carolinians, despite violence and disenfranchisement, built the churches, colleges, and businesses that prepared the next generation to reclaim its rights. By 1920, North Carolina was a state transformed. Sites used to illuminate this period include mill villages, a tobacco factory, depots, schoolhouses, general stores, a fire station, a drugstore, and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. Each volume in The Way We Lived in North Carolina examines the social history of an era, weaving interpretation around dozens of historic sites and the lives of ordinary people who lived and worked nearby. The series is based on the premise that the past can be most fully understood through the joint experience of reading history and visiting historic places. These volumes will appeal to all who are interested in North Carolina history, historic preservation, and social history.

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128

Publisher

UNC Press Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807841048

ISBN 13

9780807841044

Natives & Newcomers

The Way We Lived in North Carolina Before 1770

By: Elizabeth Anne Fenn

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Natives & Newcomers

The Way We Lived in North Carolina Before 1770

By: Elizabeth Anne Fenn

Natives and Newcomers: The Way We Lived in North Carolina before 1770

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116

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UNC Press Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807841013

ISBN 13

9780807841013

Close to the Land

The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1820-1870

By: Sydney Nathans

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Close to the Land

The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1820-1870

By: Sydney Nathans

North Carolinians of the nineteenth century dwelt in an agrarian world. Close to the Land details the lives of antebellum Carolinians from the tobacco field to the grist mill, the courthouse to the schoolyard, and the camp-meeting arbor to the slave-quarter stoop. It is the third volume in The Way We Lived in North Carolina, a pioneering series that uses historic places as windows to the past. The farm, whether of ten acres or ten thousand, was the basic unit of economic production and social organization in antebellum North Carolina. The Tar Heel town, whether port city or back-country village, was intrinsically tied to agriculture. Even budding industry and improved transportation facilities were essentially the outgrowth of efforts to process agricultural products and to reach markets efficiently. Although war and industrial expansion were to revolutionize society and transform the economy, the state's continued commitment to agriculture linked North Carolina with its rural traditions. Sites used to illuminate life in this period include slave dwellings, a coastal manor house, a piedmont farmstead, a restored theater, a female academy, an early gold mine, a rural temperance/ literary society, and a Civil War battleground. Each volume in The Way We Lived in North Carolina examines the social history of an era, weaving interpretation around dozens of historic sites and the lives of ordinary people who lived and worked nearby. The series is based on the premise that the past can be most fully understood through the joint experience of reading history and visiting historic places. These volumes will appeal to all who are interested in North Carolina history, historic preservation, and social history.

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Page Count

116

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UNC Press Books

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ISBN 10

080784103X

ISBN 13

9780807841037

Book's by Sydney Nathans

A Mind to Stay

A Mind to Stay

A Mind to Stay

A Mind to Stay

Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy

Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy

To Free a Family

To Free a Family

To Free a Family

To Free a Family

Freedom's Mirage

Freedom's Mirage

The Quest for Progress

The Quest for Progress

Natives & Newcomers

Natives & Newcomers

Close to the Land

Close to the Land

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