The history of the South in this century has been obscured in the ever-growing mass of information about the region's rapid change and turbulent development. In this book, Volume X of A History of the South, the historical image of the modern South is brought into full focus for the first time.George Brown Tindall presents a thorough and well-balanced historical narrative of the region during the years 1913--1945 when the South underwent a transformation from a predominantly agricultural area to one of growing industrialization.The inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson ended a half century of political isolation for the South and ushered in an era of agrarian reforms, prohibition, woman suffrage, industrial growth, and recurring crises for Southern farmers. During the 1920's the South was caught in a contrast of urban booms and farm distress. There were flareups of racial violence, and the Ku Klux Klan was revived. Mr. Tindall devotes considerable attention to the Southern literary renaissance which produced William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and many other notable writers and critics.The Emergence of the New South provides a new understanding of the changing political and social climate in the South under the stresses of depression, the New Deal, the labor movement, Negro unrest, and two world wars.

Reviews the economis, political, and social evolution of the Outh from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of World War I.

First published in 1955 to wide acclaim, T. Harry Williams' P.G.T. Beauregard is universally regarded as "the first authoritative portrait of the Confederacy's always dramatic, often perplexing" general (Chicago Tribune). Chivalric, arrogant, and of exotic Creole Louisiana origin, Beauregard participated in every phase of the Civil War from its beginning to its end. He rigidly adhered to principles of war derived from his studies of Jomini and Napoleon, and yet many of his battle plans were rejected by his superiors, who regarded him as excitable, unreliable, and contentious. After the war, Beauregard was almost the only prominent Confederate general who adapted successfully to the New South, running railroads and later supervising the notorious Louisiana Lottery. This paradox of a man who fought gallantly to defend the Old South and then helped industrialize it is the fascinating subject of Williams' superb biography.

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 picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. 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. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society. The Atlantic called it "one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years.

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