The Promise of the New South Life after Reconstruction

by Ayers, Edward L.

• ISBN13: 9780195085488
• ISBN10: 0195085485
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-11-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 picnic and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century--a combination of progress and reaction that defined the contradictory promise of the New South. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts--a time of progress and repression, of new industries and old ways. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic "Redeemers" swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Here is the local Baptist congregation, the country store, the tobacco-stained second-class railroad car, the rise of Populism: the teeming, nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. And central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crow laws and disenfranchisement. Ayers weaves all these details into the contradictory story of the New South, showing how the region developed the patterns it was to follow for the next fifty years. When Edward Ayers published Vengeance and Justice , a landmark study of crime and punishment in the nineteenth-century South, he received wide acclaim. Now he provides an unforgettable account of the New South--a land with one foot in the future and the other in the past.

Author Biography

Edward L. Ayers is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and is the author of Vengeance and Justice.

Table of Contents

Junction	3	(31)
Election News	34	(21)
In Town	55	(26)
Dry Goods	81	(23)
Mill and Mine	104	(28)
In Black and White	132	(28)
Faith	160	(27)
Out in the Country	187	(27)
Alliances	214	(35)
Populism	249	(34)
Turning of the Tide	283	(27)
Reunion and Reaction	310	(29)
Books	339	(34)
Voices	373	(36)
Twentieth Century Limited	409	(29)
Epilogue	438	(1)
Acknowledgments	439	(3)
Appendix. A Note on Sources and Methods	442	(4)
Abbreviations Used in Notes	446	(1)
Notes	447	(108)
Index	555