The Gullah people of St. Helena Island still relate that their people wanted to catch the learning after northern abolitionists founded Penn School in 1862, less than six months after the Union army captured the South Carolina sea islands. In this broad history Orville Vernon Burton and Wilbur Cross range across the past 150 years to reacquaint us with the far-reaching impact of a place where many daring and innovative social justice endeavors had their beginnings.
Penn Center's earliest incarnation was as a refuge where escaped and liberated enslaved people could obtain formal liberal arts schooling, even as the Civil War raged on sometimes just miles away. Penn Center then earned a place in the history of education by providing agricultural and industrial arts training for African Americans after Reconstruction and through the Jim Crow era, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Later, during the civil rights movement, Penn Center made history as a safe meeting place for organizations like Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Peace Corps. Today, Penn Center continues to build on its long tradition of leadership in progressive causes. As a social services hub for local residents and as a museum, conference, and education complex, Penn Center is a showcase for activism in such areas as cultural, material, and environmental preservation; economic sustainability; and access to health care and early learning. Here is all of Penn Center's rich past and present, as told through the experiences of its longtime Gullah inhabitants and countless visitors. Including forty-two extraordinary photographs that show Penn as it was and is now, this book recounts Penn Center's many achievements and its many challenges, reflected in the momentous events it both experienced and helped to shape.Stunning in its breadth and conclusions, The Age of Lincoln is a fiercely original history of the five decades that pivoted around the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abolishing slavery, the age's most extraordinary accomplishment, was not its most profound. The enduring legacy of the age of Lincoln was inscribing personal liberty into the nation's millennial aspirations.
America has always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s pessimism accompanied marked extremism, as Millerites predicted the Second Coming, utopianists planned perfection, Southerners made slavery an inviolable honor, and Northerners conflated Manifest Destiny with free-market opportunity. Even amid historic political compromises the middle ground collapsed. In a remarkable reappraisal of Lincoln, the distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton shows how the president's authentic Southernness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans. In the violent decades to follow, the extent of that freedom would be contested but not its central place in what defined the country. Presenting a fresh conceptualization of the defining decades of modern America, The Age of Lincoln is narrative history of the highest order.[A] learned and thoughtful portrayal of the history of race relations in America...authoritative and highly readable...[An] impressive work.
--Randall Kennedy, The Nation
In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln promised that the nation's sacrifices during the Civil War would lead to a new birth of freedom. Lincoln's Unfinished Work analyzes how the United States has attempted to realize--or subvert--that promise over the past century and a half. The volume is not solely about Lincoln, or the immediate unfinished work of Reconstruction, or the broader unfinished work of America coming to terms with its tangled history of race; it investigates all three topics.
The book opens with an essay by Richard Carwardine, who explores Lincoln's distinctive sense of humor. Later in the volume, Stephen Kantrowitz examines the limitations of Lincoln's Native American policy, while James W. Loewen discusses how textbooks regularly downplay the sixteenth president's antislavery convictions. Lawrence T. McDonnell looks at the role of poor Blacks and whites in the disintegration of the Confederacy. Eric Foner provides an overview of the Constitution-shattering impact of the Civil War amendments. Essays by J. William Harris and Jerald Podair examine the fate of Lincoln's ideas about land distribution to freedpeople. Gregory P. Downs focuses on the structural limitations that Republicans faced in their efforts to control racist violence during Reconstruction. Adrienne Petty and Mark Schultz argue that Black land ownership in the post-Reconstruction South persisted at surprisingly high rates. Rhondda Robinson Thomas examines the role of convict labor in the construction of Clemson University, the site of the conference from which this book evolved. Other essays look at events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Randall J. Stephens analyzes the political conservatism of white evangelical Christianity. Peter Eisenstadt uses the career of Jackie Robinson to explore the meanings of integration. Joshua Casmir Catalano and Briana Pocratsky examine the debased state of public history on the airwaves, particularly as purveyed by the History Channel. Gavin Wright rounds out the volume with a striking political and economic analysis of the collapse of the Democratic Party in the South. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a far-reaching, thought-provoking exploration of the unfinished work of democracy, particularly as it pertains to the legacy of slavery and white supremacy in America.In the first comprehensive accounting of the US Supreme Court's race-related jurisprudence, a distinguished historian and renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted by racial injustice.
The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice. From the Cherokee Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Court's race record--a legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. For nearly a century, the Court ensured that the nineteenth-century Reconstruction Amendments would not truly free and enfranchise African Americans. And the twenty-first century has seen a steady erosion of commitments to enforcing hard-won rights. Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Court's race jurisprudence. Addressing nearly two hundred cases involving America's racial minorities, the authors probe the parties involved, the justices' reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings. We learn of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall; villains, including Roger Taney; and enigmas like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the Supreme Court, but as this sweeping history also reminds us, the justices still have the power to make good on the country's promise of equal rights for all.No period of United States history is more important and still less understood than Reconstruction. Now, at the sesquicentennial of the Reconstruction era, Vernon Burton and Brent Morris bring together the best new scholarship on the critical years after the Civil War and before the onset of Jim Crow, synthesizing social, political, economic, and cultural approaches to understanding this crucial period.
Reconstruction was the most progressive period in United States history. Although marred by frequent violence and tragedy, it was a revolutionary era that offered hope, opportunity, and against all odds, a new birth of freedom for all Americans. Even though many of the gains of Reconstruction were rolled back and replaced with a repressive social and legal regime for African Americans, the radical spark was never fully extinguished. Its spirit fanned back into flame with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and its ramifications remain palpable to this day.
No period of United States history is more important and still less understood than Reconstruction. Now, at the sesquicentennial of the Reconstruction era, Vernon Burton and Brent Morris bring together the best new scholarship on the critical years after the Civil War and before the onset of Jim Crow, synthesizing social, political, economic, and cultural approaches to understanding this crucial period.
Reconstruction was the most progressive period in United States history. Although marred by frequent violence and tragedy, it was a revolutionary era that offered hope, opportunity, and against all odds, a new birth of freedom for all Americans. Even though many of the gains of Reconstruction were rolled back and replaced with a repressive social and legal regime for African Americans, the radical spark was never fully extinguished. Its spirit fanned back into flame with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and its ramifications remain palpable to this day.
Inspired by the University of Illinois's celebration of the Brown v. Board of Education decision's fiftieth anniversary, this collection addresses the significance of Brown in the contributors' lives or work in education and civil rights. Several authors describe their personal roles in the Brown case or similar cases, while others examine and illustrate events, performances, and exhibitions that were part of the anniversary commemoration. The book not only explores the repercussions of the Brown decision, but also stands as a historic document in its own right, preserving the reactions of many prominent intellectuals, artists, and activists fifty years after the decision.
Contributors are Kal Alston, Margaret L. Andersen, Kathryn H. Anthony, Nathaniel C. Banks, Bernice McNair Barnett, Christopher Benson, Ed Blankenheim, Julian Bond, Orville Vernon Burton, Jason Chambers, Constance Curry, Joseph A. De Laine Jr., Mary L. Dudziak, Joe R. Feagin, John Hope Franklin, Ophelia De Laine Gona, Lani Guinier, Darlene Clark Hine, Freeman A. Hrabowski III, John Jennings, Ralph Lemon, George Lipsitz, Jim Loewen, Laughlin McDonald, David O'Brien, James C. Onderdonk, Sekou Sundiata, Christopher Teal, Nicholas Watkins, Carrie Mae Weems, Juan Williams, and Joy Ann Williamson.Southern writers, historians, and artists celebrate the life and career of a beloved mentor, friend, and colleague
Edited by southern historians Orville Vernon Burton and Eldred E. Prince, Jr., Becoming Southern Writers pays tribute to South Carolinian Charles Joyner's fifty year career as a southern historian, folklorist, and social activist. Exceptional writers of fact, fiction, and poetry, the contributors to the volume are among Joyner's many friends, admirers, and colleagues as well as those to whom Joyner has served as a mentor. The contributors describe how they came to write about the South and how they came to write about it in the way they do while reflecting on the humanistic tradition of scholarship as lived experience.
The contributors constitute a Who's Who of southern writers--from award-winning literary artists to historians. Freed from constraints of their disciplines by Joyner's example, they enthusiastically describe family reunions, involvement in the civil rights movement, research projects, and mentors. While not all contributors are native to the South or the United States and a few write about the South only occasionally, all the essayists root their work in southern history, and all have made distinguished contributions to southern writing. Diverse in theme and style, these writings represent each author's personal reflections on experiences living in and writing about the South while touching on topics that surfaced in Joyner's own works, such as race, family, culture, and place. Whether based on personal or historical events, each one speaks to Joyner's theme that all history is local history, somewhere.
The wife of South Carolina secessionist governor Francis W. Pickens and known as the Queen of the Confederacy, Lucy Holcombe Pickens (1832-1899) was during her lifetime one of the most famous women in the South. Rumor was that in her youth she published a novel under a pseudonym. Recently discovered as The Free Flag of Cuba; or, The Martyrdom of Lopez: A Tale of the Liberating Expedition of 1851, her 1854 book is a romanticized account of the 1851 filibustering expedition to Cuba by Narciso López. With this new edition, Orville Vernon Burton and Georganne B. Burton resurrect Holcombe's lost work and prove it to be a window on many pressing nineteenth-century issues.
A not-so-subtle plea for U.S. support for Cuban independence from Spain, Holcombe's novel vindicates López and his men--who were officially regarded as mercenaries--and declares them to be martyred heroes. The tale clearly reflects the values southern aristocratic women expected in men, even if preserving those values meant death and defeat--a harbinger of ardent support for the Confederacy by women like Lucy. With an illuminating introduction detailing the life of Lucy Petway Holcombe Pickens and the historical context of her novel, this new edition of The Free Flag of Cuba is a welcome glimpse into the mind and value system of the southern belle who would become a southern icon.This collection of essays, organized around the theme of the struggle for equality in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, also serves to honor the renowned Civil War historian James McPherson. Complete with a brief interview with the celebrated scholar, this volume reflects the best aspects of McPherson's work, while casting new light on the struggle that has served as the animating force of his lifetime of scholarship. With a chronological span from the 1830s to the 1960s, the contributions bear witness to the continuing vigor of the argument over equality.
Contributors>: Orville Vernon Burton, Clemson University * Tom Carhart, Independent Scholar * Catherine Clinton, Queen's University Belfast * Thomas C. Cox, University of Southern California * Bruce Dain, University of Utah * John M. Giggie, University of Alabama * Michele Gillespie, Wake Forest University * Joseph T. Glatthaar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill * Brian Greenberg, Monmouth University * James K. Hogue, University of North Carolina, Charlotte * Judith A. Hunter, State University of New York, Geneseo * Ryan P. Jordan, University of San Diego * Philip M. Katz, American Association of Museums * Monroe H. Little, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis * Peyton McCrary, U.S. Department of Justice * Jerald Podair, Lawrence University * Jennifer L. Weber, University of Kansas * Ronald C. White Jr., University of California Los Angeles