Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery,...

This book examines Southerners' claims to loyal citizenship in the reunited nation after the American Civil War.

This book examines the domestic lives and leisure pursuits of planters in the antebellum American South.

This book examines the domestic lives and leisure pursuits of planters in the antebellum American South.

An examination of the literary marketplace's central role in creating the Southern Literary Renaissance.

In Dollars for Dixie, Katherine Rye Jewell demonstrates how conservative southern industrialists pursued a political campaign to preserve regional economic arrangements.

Offers a new interpretation of the lynching of Sam Hose through the lens of the religious culture in the evangelical American South.

Offers a new interpretation of the lynching of Sam Hose through the lens of the religious culture in the evangelical American South.

Between 1861 and 1865, both the Confederate South and Southern Italy underwent dramatic processes of nation-building, with the creation of the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy, in the midst of civil wars. This is the first book that compares these parallel developments by focusing on the Unionist and pro-Bourbon political forces that opposed the two new nations in inner civil conflicts. Overlapping these conflicts were the social revolutions triggered by the rebellions of American slaves and Southern Italian peasants against the slaveholding and landowning elites....

This rich collection of original essays illuminates the causes and consequences of the South's defining experiences with death.