A Rage for Order Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation

by Williamson, Joel

• ISBN13: 9780195040258
• ISBN10: 0195040252
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1986-05-29
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Crucible of Race, a major reinterpretation of black-white relations in the South, was widely acclaimed on publication and compared favorably to two of the seminal books on Southern history: Wilbur J. Cash's The Mind of the South and C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow.Representing 20 years of research and writing on the history of the South, The Crucible of Race explores the large topic of Southern race relations for a span of a century and a half. Oxford is pleased to make available an abridgement of this parent volume: A Rage for Order preserves all the themelines that were advanced in the original volume and many of the individual stories. As in Crucible of Race, Williamson here confronts the awful irony that the war to free blacks from slavery also freed racism. He examines the shift in the power base of Southern white leadership after 1850 andrecounts the terrible violence done to blacks in the name of self-protection. This condensation of one of the most important interpretations of Southern history is offered as a means by which a large audience can grasp the essentials of black-white relations--a problem that persists to this day andone with which we all must contend--North and South, black and white.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Slavery and After: Building the Organic Society, 1831-1889	p. 3
Black Life in the South, 1865-1915	p. 44
Black Images in Southern White Minds	p. 70
in Violence Veritas	p. 117
the Inner Civil War: the Conservative Mind Confronts Radicalism, 1889-1915	p. 152
White Soul	p. 206
Legacy: Race Relations in the Twentieth-Century South	p. 233
Conclusion	p. 281
Notes	p. 289
Suggestions for Further Reading	p. 303
Index	p. 311
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