"The World Almanac is the most useful reference book known to modern man."--Internet.

A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power. The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches In today’s era, often referred to as a “second Gilded Age,” this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections

KAMENSKY/EXCHANGE ARTIST

In Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932, author Mark A. Johnson examines three notable cases of Black participation in the spectacles of politics: the 1885–1898 local-option prohibition contests of Atlanta and Macon, Georgia; the United Confederate Veterans conflict with the Musicians’ Union prior to the 1903 UCV Reunion in New Orleans; and the 1909 Memphis mayoral election featuring Edward Hull Crump and W. C. Handy. Through these case studies, Johnson explains how white politicians and Black performers wielded and manipulated racist stereotypes and Lost Cause mythology to achieve their respective goals. Ultimately, Johnson portrays the vibrant, exuberant political culture of the New South and the roles played by both Black and white southerners. During the nadir of race relations in the United States South from 1877 to 1932, African Americans faced segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching. Among many forms of resistance, African Americans used their musical and theatrical talents to challenge white supremacy, attain economic opportunity, and transcend segregation. In Rough Tactics, Johnson argues that African Americans, especially performers, retooled negative stereotypes and segregation laws to their advantage. From 1877 to 1932, African Americans spoke at public rallies, generated enthusiasm with music, linked party politics to the memory of the Civil War, honored favorable candidates, and openly humiliated their opposition.

Long before the indigenous people of southeastern North America first encountered Europeans and Africans, they established communities with clear social and political hierarchies and rich cultural traditions. Award-winning historian Gregory D. Smithers brings this world to life in Native Southerners, a sweeping narrative of American Indian history in the Southeast from the time before European colonialism to the Trail of Tears and beyond. In the Native South, as in much of North America, storytelling is key to an understanding of origins and tradition—and the stories of the indigenous people of the Southeast are central to Native Southerners. Spanning territory reaching from modern-day Louisiana and Arkansas to the Atlantic coast, and from present-day Tennessee and Kentucky through Florida, this book gives voice to the lived history of such well-known polities as the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, as well as smaller Native communities like the Nottoway, Occaneechi, Haliwa-Saponi, Catawba, Biloxi-Chitimacha, Natchez, Caddo, and many others. From the oral and cultural traditions of these Native peoples, as well as the written archives of European colonists and their Native counterparts, Smithers constructs a vibrant history of the societies, cultures, and peoples that made and remade the Native South in the centuries before the American Civil War. What emerges is a complex picture of how Native Southerners understood themselves and their world—a portrayal linking community and politics, warfare and kinship, migration, adaptation, and ecological stewardship—and how this worldview shaped and was shaped by their experience both before and after the arrival of Europeans. As nuanced in detail as it is sweeping in scope, the narrative Smithers constructs is a testament to the storytelling and the living history that have informed the identities of Native Southerners to our day.

Bound together by social, demographic, and economic commonalities, the territory extending from East Texas to West Florida occupies a unique space in early American history. A masterful synthesis of two decades of scholarly work, F. Todd Smith's Louisiana and the Gulf South Frontier, 1500-1821 examines the region's history from the eve of European colonization to the final imposition of American hegemony. The agricultural richness of the Gulf Coast gave rise to an extraordinarily diverse society: development of food crops rendered local indigenous groups wealthier and more powerful than their counterparts in New England and the West, and white demand for plantation slave labor produced a disproportionately large black population compared to other parts of the country. European settlers were a heterogeneous mix as well, creating a multinational blend of cultures and religions that did not exist on the largely Anglo-Protestant Atlantic Coast. Because of this diversity, which allowed no single group to gain primacy over the rest, Smith's study characterizes the Gulf South as a frontier from the sixteenth century to the early years of the nineteenth. Only in the twenty years following the Louisiana Purchase did Americans manage to remove most of the Indian tribes, overwhelm Louisiana's French Creoles numerically and politically, and impose a racial system in accordance with the rest of the Deep South. Moving fluently across the boundaries of colonial possessions and state lines, Louisiana and the Gulf South Frontier, 1500-1821 is a comprehensive and highly readable overview of the Gulf Coast's distinctive and enthralling history.

Current research on the history and evolution of moral standards and their role in Southern society For more than thirty years, the study of honor has been fundamental to understanding southern culture and history. Defined chiefly as reputation or public esteem, honor penetrated virtually every aspect of southern ethics and behavior, including race, gender, law, education, religion, and violence. In The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity, editors John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette bring together new research by twenty emerging and established scholars who study the varied practices and principles of honor in its American context, across an array of academic disciplines. Following pathbreaking works by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Dickson D. Bruce, and Edward L. Ayers, this collection notes that honor became a distinctive mark of southern culture and something that—alongside slavery—set the South distinctly off from the rest of the United States. This anthology brings together the work of a variety of writers who collectively explore both honor's range and its limitations, revealing a South largely divided between the demands of honor and the challenges of an emerging market culture—one common to the United States at large. They do so by methodologically examining legal studies, market behaviors, gender, violence, and religious and literary expressions. Honor emerges here as a tool used to negotiate modernity's challenges rather than as a rigid tradition and set of assumptions codified in unyielding rules and rhetoric. Some topics are traditional for the study of honor, some are new, but all explore the question: how different really is the South from America writ large? The Field of Honor builds an essential bridge between two distinct definitions of southern—and, by extension, American—character and identity.