After the Civil War, the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, forged a different path than most southern urban centers. Long a portal to the Deep South, Chattanooga was largely rebuilt by northern men, using northern capital, and imbued with northern industrial values. As such, the city served as a cultural and economic nexus between North and South, and its northern elite stood out distinctively from the rest of the region’s booster class. In Chattanooga, 1865–1900, Tim Ezzell explores Chattanooga’s political and economic development from the close of the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century, revealing how this unique business class adapted, prospered, and governed in the postwar South. After reviewing Chattanooga’s wartime experience, Ezzell chronicles political and economic developments in the city over the next two generations. White Republicans, who dominated municipal government thanks to the support of Chattanooga’s large African American population, clashed repeatedly with Democrats, who worked to “redeem” the city from Republican rule and restore “responsible,” “efficient” government. Ezzell shows that, despite the efforts by white Democrats to undermine black influence, black Chattanoogans continued to wield considerable political leverage into the 1890s. On the economic front, an extensive influx of northern entrepreneurs and northern capital into postwar Chattanooga led to dynamic if unstable growth. Ezzell details the city’s efforts to compete with Birmingham as the center of southern iron and steel production. At times, this vision was within reach, but these hopes faded by the 1890s, and Chattanooga grew into something altogether different: not northern, not southern, but something peculiar “set down in Dixie.” Although Chattanooga never reached its Yankee boosters’ ideal of “a northern industrial city at home in the southern hills,” Ezzell demonstrates that it forged a legacy of resilience and resourcefulness that continues to serve the community to the present day.

This definitive encyclopedia offers 1,534 entries on Tennessee by 514 authors. With thirty-two essays on topics from agriculture to World War II, this major reference work includes maps, photos, extensive cross-referencing, bibliographical information, and a detailed index.

"John T. Wilder was an entrepreneur, Civil War general, and business leader who would become influential in the development of post-Civil War Chattanooga. A northern transplant who made his early fortune in the iron industry, Wilder would gain notoriety in the Western Theater through his victories at the battles of Chattanooga, Chickamauga, and throughout the Tullahoma and Atlanta Campaigns while leading the famous "Lightning Brigade." After the Civil War, he relocated to Chattanooga and began the Roane Iron Company and fostered southern ironworks throughout the southeast. He was elected mayor of Chattanooga but would fail to be elected to Congress as its representative. Finally, he was instrumental in the establishment of national military parks in Chattanooga and Chickamauga. Nicely's biography captures the life of a man important to the overall development of Chattanooga and East Tennessee and argues that Wilder was influential in bringing both northern and immigrant populations to the area"--

Unlike most southern whites during the Civil War, the majority of residents of the Appalachian counties resisted secession, and a significant minority fought against the Confederacy. After 1865, many joined the Republican Party and remained the only large group of white southerners in the party until the 1950s. In this important work, first published in 1978, Gordon McKinney offers a detailed, balanced, and deeply researched narrative history of the emergence and growth of mountain Republicanism. Although the story is told in terms of the changing fortunes of the mountain Republican Parties, McKinney's research and analysis illuminate many facets of the social, economic, and political history of Appalachia. Among the author's principal findings are that the impact of the Civil War and the absence of African Americans, rather than economic or geographical factors, were responsible for the persistence of Republican voting patterns in the Appalachian community. Even more significant is his discovery that mountain Republicanism was the conscious creation of politicians in a five-state region who shaped their party to conform to local political conditions.

In the fall of 1865, two Union officers stationed in East Tennessee during the Civil War - Hiram Chamberlain and John Wilder -- decided to stay in the South to pursue business careers. They recognized potential in the "untapped" resources they had seen during military operations in this part of the state. Within the space of four years, Chamberlain and Wilder had recruited business partners, built an operating iron furnace in the Upper Tennessee River Valley (the Roane Iron Company), and established a company town at Rockwood, Tennessee. Twenty years later, in some parts of Appalachia, new planned towns were being established by land companies that wanted to develop model industrial real estate ventures. In the Upper Tennessee River Valley, these new towns - Cardiff, Harriman, and Lenoir City, Tennessee - were planned to be the quintessential places for industrial production and urban living as they were characterized by urban/sanitary reform ideals, temperance tenets, and distinctive urban landscapes. In Appalachian Aspirations, John Benhart presents the story of the evolution of capitalism and regional development in the Upper Tennessee River Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Both the North and the South viewed the Civil War in Christian terms. Each side believed that its fight was just, that God favored its cause. Rebuilding Zion is the first study to explore simultaneously the reaction of southern white evangelicals, northern white evangelicals, and Christian freedpeople to Confederate defeat. As white southerners struggled to assure themselves that the collapse of the Confederacy was not an indication of God's stern judgment, white northerners and freedpeople were certain that it was. Author Daniel W. Stowell tells the story of the religious reconstruction of the South following the war, a bitter contest between southern and northern evangelicals, at the heart of which was the fate of the freedpeople's souls and the southern effort to maintain a sense of sectional identity. Central to the southern churches' vision of the Civil War was the idea that God had not abandoned the South; defeat was a Father's stern chastisement. Secession and slavery had not been sinful; rather, it was the radicalism of the northern denominations that threatened the purity of the Gospel. Northern evangelicals, armed with a vastly different vision of the meaning of the war and their call to Christian duty, entered the post-war South intending to save white southerner and ex-slave alike. The freedpeople, however, drew their own providential meaning from the war and its outcome. The goal for blacks in the postwar period was to establish churches for themselves separate from the control of their former masters. Stowell plots the conflicts that resulted from these competing visions of the religious reconstruction of the South. By demonstrating how the southern vision eventually came to predominate over, but not eradicate, the northern and freedpeople's visions for the religious life of the South, he shows how the southern churches became one of the principal bulwarks of the New South, a region marked by intense piety and intense racism throughout the twentieth century.