The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction - 15th Anniversary EditionAt 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. |
Contents
| 3 | |
CHAPTER TWO Election News | 34 |
CHAPTER THREE In Town | 55 |
CHAPTER FOUR Dry Goods | 81 |
CHAPTER FIVE Mill and Mine | 104 |
CHAPTER SIX In Black and White | 132 |
CHAPTER SEVEN Faith | 160 |
CHAPTER EIGHT Out in the Country | 187 |
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Books | 339 |
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Voices | 373 |
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Twentieth Century Limited | 409 |
EPILOGUE | 438 |
THOUGHTS ON THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION | 439 |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | 445 |
APPENDIX | 448 |
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES | 452 |
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agricultural Alabama Alliance Alliancemen American Arkansas Atlanta Baptist Baton Rouge became began Black Belt black voters Braxton century Chapel Hill Chopin church Clive Metcalfe colored companies convention cotton counties crop Democrats diary disfranchisement diss early economic election Ellen Glasgow farm farmers Georgia Gilded Age History industry John Kate Chopin Kentucky labor land leaders legislature lived Louisiana LSU Press lynching merchants mill Mississippi mountains movement Negro newspaper North Carolina Northern organization Orleans Oxford Univ Papers percent Ph.D Piedmont plantation planters played Polk population Populist Progressivism quoted race relations racial railroad reform region Republicans rural seemed segregation social songs South Southern Politics story tenants Tennessee Texas things Tillman tion Tom Watson town turn UNC Press UNC-SHC Virginia vote W. E. B. DuBois Washington white Southerners William woman women workers wrote York young