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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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780199886838
Publisert
2016
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter