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Southern Crucible presents the story of the American South in a form that can be understood by students and general readers. It explains, in twenty-four chapters, how and why the American South came into existence. Its coverage is comprehensive, from the first peoples and their contact with invading Europeans, to cultural and social changes affecting the South up until the early twentieth-first century. It combines a general narrative with a thematic framework, combining the diversity within the South with the ways in which southerners, white and black, fashioned a strong regional identity. It combines an understanding of politics and power with cultural, social, and economic forces that shaped the lives of ordinary people.
The book charts the central role of race in the evolution of the powerful regional identity - and the clash of identities - over the course of southern history. The establishment of plantation slavery in the seventeenth century; its solidification in social, legal, constitutional, and political institutions by 1776; and its revitalization as a result of the cotton boom all made racial domination a prevailing feature of southern life by the time of the Civil War. The destruction of slavery as a result of the war, followed by emancipation, the uncertainties of freedom, and the harsh reimposition of white supremacy, defined the New South era. But slavery and emancipation cast a long shadow. The undoing of public segregation during the civil rights era made the problem of race a national, even international, challenge.
William A. Link
2015, 6" x 9", Paper, Index, 316 pp.
ISBN: 9780199763627
111-L6362
