Legitimized Violent Slave Abuse in the American South, 1619-1865: A Case Study of Law and Social Change in Six Southern States

1985 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Fede
Author(s):  
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall ◽  
Kathryn Nasstrom

A case study of the southern oral history program is the essence of this chapter. From its start in 1973 until 1999, the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) was housed by the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), rather than in the library or archives, where so many other oral history programs emerged. The SOHP is now part of UNC's Center for the Study of the American South, but it continues to play an integral role in the department of history. Concentrating on U.S. southern racial, labor, and gender issues, the program offers oral history courses and uses interviews to produce works of scholarship, such as the prize-winning book Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. The folks at the Institute for Southern Studies tried to combine activism with analysis, trying to figure out how to take the spirit of the movement into a new era.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mallory Lapointe Taylor

Within the United States, the American South can be perceived as its own entity. From the arts to Southern cuisine, the South commands attention with its own history, myths and culture. Within the history of photography, Walker Evans's photographs of Alabama are arguably some of the most culturally significant images taken of the state and its residents. This thesis investigates how photographs of Alabama are collected in the same locality. By examining the collecting practices of four Alabama institutions in regards to photographs in general, and Walker Evans specifically, this case study will expand on the question of how photographs, in a Southern cultural context, work to create a sense of place and attachment to local geography.


2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
R M

The southern states of the United States of America and South Africa share a number of analogous historical realities. One of these, which is the main subject of  this article,  is  the way in which the memory of a lost war had fused cultural mythology and religious symbolism to provide a foundation for the formation and maintenance of attitudes of white supremacy in both contexts.  This article seeks to achieve a historical  understanding of the complex interrelationship between the development of cultural identity and Protestant Christianity by  focusing on these issues in the histories of the Afrikaner and the white American Southerner in comparative perspective. 


Author(s):  
Perla M. Guerrero

Latinas/os were present in the American South long before the founding of the United States of America, yet knowledge about their southern communities in different places and time periods is deeply uneven. In fact, regional themes important throughout the South clarify the dynamics that shaped Latinas/os’ lives, especially race, ethnicity, and the colorline; work and labor; and migration and immigration. Ideas about racial difference, in particular, reflected specifics of place, and intersections of local, regional, and international endeavors and movements of people and resources. Accordingly, Latinas/os’ position and treatment varied across the South. They first worked in agricultural fields picking cotton, oranges, and harvesting tobacco, then in a variety of industries, especially poultry and swine processing and packing. The late 20th century saw the rapid growth of Latinas/os in southern states due to changing migration and immigration patterns that moved from traditional states of reception to new destinations in rural, suburban, and urban locales with limited histories with Latinas/os or with substantial numbers of immigrants in general.


2005 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrico Dal Lago

To date, only a handful of scholars, most notably C.L.R. James and Eugene Genovese, have seen slave rebellions and peasant revolts as having anything in common. Fewer scholars still would be prepared to accept the assumption that slaves and peasants were agrarian working classes that shared significant characteristics. Yet, the issues of rural unrest and class formation continue to haunt the historiography of both slave and peasant societies long after James' and Genovese's studies, and have forced several historians to revise and broaden their definitions of class conflict as a means to describe the social transformations of several rural regions. In this essay, I focus on the American South as a case study of a slave society and on the Italian South, or Mezzogiorno, as a case study of a peasant society. Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between the social structures of these two regions, in both cases debates on the class character of rural workers began when leftist historians raised the possibility of applying Marxist categories to their particular historical conditions. In both cases, they were dealing with a ‘south’ characterized by a preeminently agricultural economy and a persistent social and political conservatism. In both cases, too, the debate has moved from broad theoretical positions to the explanation of specific instances of class conflict in a rural setting—the slaves' resistance to their masters and the peasants' resistance to their landlords, respectively—and then on to a criticism of the Marxist approach to the problem.


2016 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 1078-1112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shari Eli ◽  
Laura Salisbury

Beginning in the 1880s, southern states introduced pensions for Confederate veterans and widows. They expanded these programs through the 1920s, while states outside the region were introducing cash transfer programs for workers, poor mothers, and the elderly. Using pension application records and county-level electoral data, we argue that political considerations guided the distribution of these pensions. We show that Confederate pension programs were funded during years in which Democratic gubernatorial candidates were threatened at the ballot box. Moreover, we show that pensions were disbursed to counties in which these candidates had lost ground to candidates from alternative parties.


1998 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hoyt F. LeCroy

From as early as 1855 and extending to the middle of the twentieth century, American industry encouraged the formation of bands and other musical organizations for workers, ostensibly to enhance their welfare. The actual purposes of music in industry, however, were often to prevent formation of unions and maintain social regimes. As industry expanded into the agrarian South, industrial bands augmented the limited town band tradition. Their performances, role-modeling and community-based instruction of young people filled curricular voids and developed favorable cultural environments for the eventual addition of instrumental music to public school curricula. A historical case study of the activities and influences of a significant industrial band in the state of Georgia provides a basis for formulating conclusions regarding influences of industry on music education in the American South.


2013 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelia R. Wilson

This paper considers how 'preaching prejudice' builds a constituency of like-minds by marginalizing others-on grounds of race and sexuality, for example-and then instructs this constituency regarding political behavior. This discussion is part of a larger project on the construction of social values for political gain but here I specifically draw attention to the historical racism marking much of Protestant messaging in the American South and to how this racism became the foundation for the Republican Southern Strategy from the 1970s onwards. In doing so, I take as a case study the well documented racism associated with the history of the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC historical narrative exemplifies the racism which underpinned the Southern Strategy. This is interesting because the SBC continues to be a key political actor among social conservatives in the South. This historical narrative indicates how 'preaching prejudice' became a political tool fueling the racism of Nixon's campaign and seasoning subsequent campaigns. The paper then suggests that the most recent innovation of this familiar, well honed political tool can be located in contemporary discourse on same-sex marriage.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart E. Tolnay ◽  
E. M. Beck

Past empirical research into the history of racially motivated mob violence in the American South has relied almost exclusively on the record of completed lynchings. In this article, we propose that a better definition of “racialized terrorism” would also include the record of lynching threats. Using a newly available confirmed inventory of lynching threats for 11 Southern states from 1880 to 1929, we demonstrate that the total quantum of racialized terrorism nearly doubles when completed lynchings and lynching threats are combined, with some states and decades affected more than others. Parallel analyses suggest that previous conclusions regarding important environmental predictors of Southern mob violence, such as agricultural specialty, political party strength, and racial population composition, are robust to an expansion of racialized terrorism to include threatened lynchings. However, sufficient differences are found between the predictors of completed and threatened lynchings to suggest the need for future researchers to consider broadening the measurement of racialized terrorism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 5-20
Author(s):  
Anita Howard

Grounded in the findings from a case study of a nonprofit educational consulting firm that specialized in math literacy reform and operated throughout the American South during the 1990s–early 2000s, this paper presents Generative Engagement (GE), a practice-centered process model on relational behavior that fosters prosocial interaction and collaboration among social identity groups in demographically diverse, highly stratified social environments. The paper describes the dynamic interplay between generativity and inclusivity, presents four different types of relational engagement that result from this interplay and offers five testable propositions. The paper concludes with a discussion on how cross-boundary leaders, work teams, organizations, and communities can better understand, develop, and demonstrate generative relational behavior that enhances work group efficacy and sustains the greater public good. Along with encouraging scholarly exploration of GE, the generative engagement model (GEM) is offered as a tool for inspiring and equipping development and use of generative approaches to leadership, collaboration, and transformative change within organizations.


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