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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
[Introduction To] The Promise Of The New South: Life After Reconstruction, Edward L. Ayers
[Introduction To] The Promise Of The New South: Life After Reconstruction, Edward L. Ayers
Bookshelf
At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century.
Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee …
W.J. Cash, The New South And The Rhetoric Of History, Edward L. Ayers
W.J. Cash, The New South And The Rhetoric Of History, Edward L. Ayers
History Faculty Publications
Despite the attention devoted to the fiery early chapters of The Mind of the South, where Cash's language and audacity take us by surprise, the heart of the book lies in the New South. Cash wrote above all, I think, to explain why the white Southerners he knew--those in the cotton mill country of the Carolina Piedmont--behaved the way they did. The years after Reconstruction consume two-thirds of Cash's book because those are the years that troubled him, that posed the problems he felt most acutely.