History Commons^™

The Great Valley And The Meaning Of The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

To understand the coming of the Civil War, then, we need to pick up the story before Fort Sumter and to carry it deeper than national events. We need to understand both the advocated of conflict and those who sought to avoid it regardless of the cost. We need to understand the communities people fought to defend, the institutions that held them together and that drove them apart.

Rethinking Slavery And Freedom (Book Reviews), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review essay of the following books:

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America by Ira Berlin.

Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War edited by Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland.

When The North Is The South: Life In The Netherlands, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

After years of watching colleagues fly to Paris, Johannesburg, Beijing, or Bogota for research trips and speaking engagements, I decided to apply for a posting abroad. Holding only the vaguest and most stereotyped visions, I chose the Netherlands. My application stressed, perhaps impolitely, the direct Dutch involvement in the slave trade and their indirect connection to South African apartheid. Such commonalities with white southerners, I suggested, might serve as the basis for interesting discussions of race and region.

Referees' Reports, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Response to the essay, Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the American Historian by Joel Williamson. Indiana: Organization of American Historians, 1997.

Narrative Form In Origins Of The New South, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Because I came to southern history late and somewhat reluctantly, that last graduate seminar class taught by C. Vann Woodward, was the only class I ever took on the subject. But that seminar and book I read for the first time that semester -- Origins of the New South -- made me an aspiring southernist.

El Que No Tiene Dingo, Tiene Mandingo: The Inadequacy Of The "Mestizo" As A Theoretical Construct In The Field Of Latin American Studies - The Problem And Solution, Andrew Rosa

History Faculty Publications

At a recent lecture at Temple University titled The African Presence in Puerto Rico, a young African woman from the island proclaimed to the audience that the Black experience in the United States is indeed unique and, because of her "mestizo" heritage, acculturation, racism, and struggle were not a part of her historical experience. As I looked on the face of my beautiful African sister, my heart shattered into a thousand little pieces. The lessons passed down to us from our African ancestors in the oral tradition-el que no tiene Dingo, tiene Mandingo-have finally fallen on deaf ears. Their struggle …

Discovering The Chichimecas, Charlotte M. Gradie

History Faculty Publications

The European practice of conceptualizing their enemies so that they could dispose of them in ways that were not in accord with their own Christian principles is well documented. In the Americas, this began with Columbus's designation of certain Indians as man-eaters and was continued by those Spanish who also wished to enslave the natives or eliminate them altogether. The word “cannibal” was invented to describe such people, and the Spanish were legally free to treat cannibals in ways that were forbidden to them in their relations with other people. By the late fifteenth century the word cannibal had assumed …

The South, The West, And The Rest, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

A response to the essay, Constructed Province: History and the Making of the Last American West by David M. Emmons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Many Voices, Similar Concerns: Traditional Methods Of African-American Political Activity In Norfolk, Virginia, 1865-1875, Michael Hucles

History Faculty Publications

African-Americans in postbellum Norfolk, Virginia, as elsewhere, knew that merely gaining freedom through government action--the Confiscation Acts, Emancipation Proclamation, and Thirteenth Amendment--did not guarantee that they would be fairly treated. They therefore attempted to gain control of their lives through a vigorous affirmation of their rights. They began to record their antebellum marriages and normalize family relations, obtain an education, establish a base for economic prosperity, and participate in the political process. Through these actions they hoped to give true meaning to their freedom. Unfortunately, they were not always successful in their attempts.

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.

Review Of The Yankton Sioux, Michael L. Tate

History Faculty Publications

Although numerous nonfiction works about American Indians fill juvenile sections of public libraries, most are written by educators who know little about the subtleties of Indian life. The result is a myriad of books that reflect a "Great Chiefs" approach, or worse yet, a type of composite Native American hero distill tribes for the young adult and general reading audience, Frank W. Porter III, Director of Chelsea House Foundation for the Study of American Indians, has initiated a 53-volume series of tribally and topically organized books. The length of each volume is rigidly maintained at 111 pages, and the list …

Baptized In Blood: The Religion Of The Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 by Charles Reagan Wilson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.