As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception--and at the heart--of the new south.

The crises of the twentieth century - wars, genocide, the proliferation of atomic weapons, the rise and fall of communism, the breakup of the family - have shaken our faith in modernity and in the fundamental conceit upon which it is grounded: that human beings are capable of providing their own moral and political order. Ideologies based on this conceit have at their heart the revolt against God that has so characterized modern history, and these ideologies have failed us. Walsh contends that the solution is to recover the spiritual foundations of freedom and order. To make his case, he draws lessons from the intellectual pilgrimages of four contemporary thinkers who overcame the modern spirit of revolt against God: Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Camus, and Voegelin. He shows how each confronted the full consequences of secular messianism and found within his own experience the means of overcoming it. In the process of mounting a critique of modernity and articulating the direction in which the alternative lies, the four recovered what is in essence philosophic Christianity. They show us that beyond nihilism, beyond the revolt against God, there is the existential rediscovery of transcendent truth. Walsh believes liberal democracy is redeemable, but that its redemption hinges on our return to a proper understanding of human nature and to a spiritual foundation based on Christian principles. We must first recognize, however, that without God, without moral absolutes, without divine order, we can not resolve our worldwide modern crisis.

In this collection, twelve philosophers, historians and political philosophers assess aspects of socialism.

Freedom has become a labor camp. Cameras, cyber surveillance, and clandestine security contain truth as free-citizens engineer systems to restrict children inside a police state. Set in 2042, society’s day-wardens fight those managing the Corporation at night while super-wardens expand their government. Prisoner Noodle Church doesn't mind working in Freedom Incorporated. Yet refusal to call it freedom lands Noodle in Freedom Inc.’s medium-security ward where day-wardens pressure him to reveal work at night. And when Noodle exercises his right to remain silent, because living in Freedom is easier that way, super-wardens take the hero for interrogation. A beacon of freedom in day and night wardens’ bi-polar war for power, Noodle is moved to high-security but before getting locked-up in a super-max facility wardens offer a deal. Noodle can work in Freedom’s low-security ward if he pleads insanity then testifies clandestine security caught pursuing were a figment of his imagination. Noodle refuses to call this freedom! Night-shift wardens try murdering him then day-shift wardens place Noodle in solitary confinement. From here his character writes the prisoners of Freedom Incorporated, asking for freedom to lead without bombs, bullets, powders, or policemen.