Yankee Town, Southern City

Yankee Town, Southern City
Author: Steven Elliot Tripp
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 1999-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 081478237X

One of the most hotly debated issues in the historical study of race relations is the question of how the Civil War and Reconstruction affected social relations in the South. Did the War leave class and race hierarchies intact? Or did it mark the profound disruption of a long-standing social order? Yankee Town, Southern City examines how the members of the southern community of Lynchburg, Virginia experienced four distinct but overlapping events--Secession, Civil War, Black Emancipation, and Reconstruction. By looking at life in the grog shop, at the military encampment, on the street corner, and on the shop floor, Steven Elliott Tripp illustrates the way in which ordinary people influenced the contours of race and class relations in their town.

Miss Mary's Money

Miss Mary's Money
Author: H.G. Jones
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2015-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786496622

"Miss Smith, the wealthy old lady who died recently near Chapel Hill, and who bequeathed a large sum of money to the State University, did not fail to remember her old slaves, of whom six are now living," read the New York Times, December 6, 1885. But the Times got it wrong: land, not money, was left to the University of North Carolina and five of Mary Ruffin Smith's former slaves. Four were also her nieces--sired by her two bachelor brothers--and all had the same mother, the Smiths' maid Harriet. A spinster, Mary raised the girls, baptized them into the Episcopal Church, married them to respectable biracial men and left each 100 acres in her will. The result of eight years of research, this book tells the story of the Smith family and the fortune that survived the profligacy of Mary's father before being willed to the university and the North Carolina Episcopal diocese. Every "legitimate" member of the family lies in a small cemetery near the former estate. Harriet was buried an unmarked grave somewhere in Orange County. The hundreds of descendants of her daughters have been virtually ignored--this book is for them.

Encyclopedia of Women in American History

Encyclopedia of Women in American History
Author: Joyce Appleby
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1438
Release: 2015-07-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 131747161X

This illustrated encyclopedia examines the unique influence and contributions of women in every era of American history, from the colonial period to the present. It not only covers the issues that have had an impact on women, but also traces the influence of women's achievements on society as a whole. Divided into three chronologically arranged volumes, the set includes historical surveys and thematic essays on central issues and political changes affecting women's lives during each period. These are followed by A-Z entries on significant events and social movements, laws, court cases and more, as well as profiles of notable American women from all walks of life and all fields of endeavor. Primary sources and original documents are included throughout.

Saving Savannah

Saving Savannah
Author: Jacqueline Jones
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2009-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400078164

In this masterful portrait of life in Savannah before, during, and after the Civil War, prize-winning historian Jacqueline Jones transports readers to the balmy, raucous streets of that fabled Southern port city. Here is a subtle and rich social history that weaves together stories of the everyday lives of blacks and whites, rich and poor, men and women from all walks of life confronting the transformations that would alter their city forever. Deeply researched and vividly written, Saving Savannah is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the Civil War years.

Life and Letters of Dolly Madison

Life and Letters of Dolly Madison
Author: Allen Culling Clark
Publisher: Washington : Press of W. F. Roberts Company
Total Pages: 626
Release: 1914
Genre: Presidents' spouses
ISBN:

Dolley Madison has been known under different names: Dolly, Dolley, Dorothy and Dorothea. Some of her biographers insisted that her given name was Dorothea, others wrote that it was really Dorothy - although generally in their book titles they bowed to the convention of Dolly. Source: http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/madison/overview/name.html.

We Mean to Be Counted

We Mean to Be Counted
Author: Elizabeth R. Varon
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807866083

Over the past two decades, historians have successfully disputed the notion that American women remained wholly outside the realm of politics until the early twentieth century. Still, a consensus has prevailed that, unlike their Northern counterparts, women of the antebellum South were largely excluded from public life. With this book, Elizabeth Varon effectively challenges such historical assumptions. Using a wide array of sources, she demonstrates that throughout the antebellum period, white Southern women of the slaveholding class were important actors in the public drama of politics. Through their voluntary associations, legislative petitions, presence at political meetings and rallies, and published appeals, Virginia's elite white women lent their support to such controversial reform enterprises as the temperance movement and the American Colonization Society, to the electoral campaigns of the Whig and Democratic Parties, to the literary defense of slavery, and to the causes of Unionism and secession. Against the backdrop of increasing sectional tension, Varon argues, these women struggled to fulfill a paradoxical mandate: to act both as partisans who boldly expressed their political views and as mediators who infused public life with the "feminine" virtues of compassion and harmony.