Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War

Edited by Paul A. Cimbala and Barton C. Shaw
Foreword by Charles Joyner

Details: 328 pages     6.125 x 9.25
Cloth: $59.95   ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3067-8   
Pubdate: 8/19/2007
Series: New Perspectives on the History of the South
Review(s): 4 available

Cloth:

Overview

"An important and useful collection of essays…They focus on questions of race, leadership, and the possibility of change in the New South."--Gaines M. Foster, Louisiana State University

"Rarely does one see a collection that is so unified in both theme and execution. This fresh and insightful volume will make a substantial contribution to historical scholarship on the New South."--Thomas H. Appleton, Jr., Eastern Kentucky University

By focusing on specific communities, these essays examine the efforts of individuals and small groups to build their vision of the New South. Ranging across the region, from Texas to Virginia, the essays examine specific events at the city or state level.


Naturally, politics and race play a major role, from white Republicans in post-emancipation North Carolina to Northern Mississippi Rural Legal Services in the 1970s. Depression-era Atlanta, segregated Louisville, South Carolina governors, and the way memory affects race in twentieth-century Waco are among the broad range of studies offered in this collection.

The contributors to Making a New South explore how white southerners attempted to rebuild their society after suffering defeat during the Civil War and how black southerners worked to establish themselves as free people with all the rights they believed that emancipation had promised to them. Collectively, these essays reveal the public endeavors of idealistic and pragmatic southerners of all races, including preachers, politicians, and public servants, to remake their world in the century following Reconstruction.

Paul A. Cimbala is professor of history at Fordham University. Barton C. Shaw is professor of history at Cedar Crest College in Allentown Pennsylvania.