Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists

Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists
Author: Matthew Hild
Publisher:
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2007
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Hild shows that the Populist (or People's) Party, the most important third party of the 1890s, established itself most solidly in Texas, Alabama, and, under the guise of the earlier Union Labor Party, Arkansas, where farmer-labor political coalitions from the 1870s to mid-1880s had laid the groundwork for populism's expansion.

Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists

Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists
Author: Matthew Hild
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2010-02-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0820336564

Historians have widely studied the late-nineteenth-century southern agrarian revolts led by such groups as the Farmers' Alliance and the People's (or Populist) Party. Much work has also been done on southern labor insurgencies of the same period, as kindled by the Knights of Labor and others. However, says Matthew Hild, historians have given only minimal consideration to the convergence of these movements. Hild shows that the Populist (or People's) Party, the most important third party of the 1890s, established itself most solidly in Texas, Alabama, and, under the guise of the earlier Union Labor Party, Arkansas, where farmer-labor political coalitions from the 1870s to mid-1880s had laid the groundwork for populism's expansion. Third-party movements fared progressively worse in Georgia and North Carolina, where little such coalition building had occurred, and in places like Tennessee and South Carolina, where almost no history of farmer-labor solidarity existed. Hild warns against drawing any direct correlations between a strong Populist presence in a given place and a background of farmer-laborer insurgency. Yet such a background could only help Populists and was a necessary precondition for the initially farmer-oriented Populist Party to attract significant labor support. Other studies have found a lack of labor support to be a major reason for the failure of Populism, but Hild demonstrates that the Populists failed despite significant labor support in many parts of the South. Even strong farmer-labor coalitions could not carry the Populists to power in a region in which racism and violent and fraudulent elections were, tragically, central features of politics.

Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 221
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 0826221661

Grand Army of Labor

Grand Army of Labor
Author: Matthew E. Stanley
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252052641

Enlisting memory in a new fight for freedom From the Gilded Age through the Progressive era, labor movements reinterpreted Abraham Lincoln as a liberator of working people while workers equated activism with their own service fighting for freedom during the war. Matthew E. Stanley explores the wide-ranging meanings and diverse imagery used by Civil War veterans within the sprawling radical politics of the time. As he shows, a rich world of rituals, songs, speeches, and newspapers emerged among the many strains of working class cultural politics within the labor movement. Yet tensions arose even among allies. Some people rooted Civil War commemoration in nationalism and reform, and in time, these conservative currents marginalized radical workers who tied their remembering to revolution, internationalism, and socialism. An original consideration of meaning and memory, Grand Army of Labor reveals the complex ways workers drew on themes of emancipation and equality in the long battle for workers’ rights.

Gwinnett County, Georgia, and the Transformation of the American South, 1818–2018

Gwinnett County, Georgia, and the Transformation of the American South, 1818–2018
Author: Matthew Hild
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2022-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820362085

In Gwinnett County’s two hundred years, the area has been western, southern, rural, suburban, and now increasingly urban. Its stories include the displacement of Native peoples, white settlement, legal battles over Indian Removal, slavery and cotton, the Civil War and the Lost Cause, New South railroad and town development, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, business development and finance in a national economy, a Populist uprising and Black outmigration, the entrance of women into the political arena, the evolution of cotton culture, the development of modern infrastructure, and the transformation from rural to suburban to a multicultural urbanizing place. Gwinnett, as its chamber of commerce likes to say, has it all. However, Gwinnett has yet to be the focus of a major historical exploration—until now. Through a compilation of essays written by professional historians with expertise in a diverse array of eras and fields, Michael Gagnon and Matthew Hild’s collection finally tells these stories in a systematic way—avoiding the pitfalls of nonprofessional local histories that tend to ignore issues of race, class, or gender. While not claiming to be comprehensive, this book provides general readers and scholars alike with a glimpse at Gwinnett through the ages.

Goldbugs and Greenbacks

Goldbugs and Greenbacks
Author: Gretchen Ritter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1999-06-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521653923

This is a book about the late-nineteenth-century money debates in American politics, and about the role of history in American political development.

Populism in the South Revisited

Populism in the South Revisited
Author: James M. Beeby
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2012-01-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1617032336

The Populist Movement was the largest mass movement for political and economic change in the history of the American South until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Populist Movement in this book is defined as the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party, as well as the Agricultural Wheel and Knights of Labor in the 1880s and 1890s. The Populists threatened the political hegemony of the white racist southern Democratic Party during populism's high point in the mid-1890s; and the populists threw the New South into a state of turmoil Populism in the South Revisited: New Interpretations and New Departures brings together nine of the best new works on the populist movement in the South that grapple with several larger themes—such as the nature of political insurgency, the relationship between African Americans and whites, electoral reform, new economic policies and producerism, and the relationship between rural and urban areas—in case studies that center on several states and at the local level. Each essay offers both new research and new interpretations into the causes, course, and consequences of the populist insurgency. One essay analyzes how notions of debt informed the Populist insurgency in North Carolina, the one state where the Populists achieved statewide power, while another analyzes the Populists' failed attempts in Grant Parish, Louisiana, to align with African Americans and Republicans to topple the incumbent Democrats. Other topics covered include populist grassroots organizing with African Americans to stop disfranchisement in North Carolina; the Knights of Labor and the relationship with populism in Georgia; organizing urban populism in Dallas, Texas; Tom Watson's relationship with Midwest Populism; the centrality of African Americans in populism, a comparative analysis of Populism across the Deep South, and how the rhetoric and ideology of populism impacted socialism and the Garvey movement in the early twentieth century. Together these studies offer new insights into the nature of southern populism and the legacy of the Peoples' Party in the South.

Knights Unhorsed

Knights Unhorsed
Author: Robert E. Weir
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780814328736

Knights Unhorsed examines the internal conflict and external pressures that drove one of America's most promising labor organizations into obscurity less than a half a century later." "This book will interest scholars and students of labor history, nineteenth century studies and American studies."--BOOK JACKET.

From the Grounds Up

From the Grounds Up
Author: Casey Marina Lurtz
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2019-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503608476

In the late nineteenth century, Latin American exports boomed. From Chihuahua to Patagonia, producers sent industrial fibers, tropical fruits, and staple goods across oceans to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from foreign markets. In southern Mexico's Soconusco district, the coffee trade would transform rural life. A regional history of the Soconusco as well as a study in commodity capitalism, From the Grounds Up places indigenous and mestizo villagers, migrant workers, and local politicians at the center of our understanding of the export boom. An isolated, impoverished backwater for most of the nineteenth century, by 1920, the Soconusco had transformed into a small but vibrant node in the web of global commerce. Alongside plantation owners and foreign investors, a dense but little-explored web of small-time producers, shopowners, and laborers played key roles in the rapid expansion of export production. Their deep engagement with rural development challenges the standard top-down narrative of market integration led by economic elites allied with a strong state. Here, Casey Marina Lurtz argues that the export boom owed its success to a diverse body of players whose choices had profound impacts on Latin America's export-driven economy during the first era of globalization.

The Populist Vision

The Populist Vision
Author: Charles Postel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 660
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0195384717

A major reinterpretation of the Populist movement, this text argues that the Populists were modern people, rejecting the notion that Populism opposed modernity and progress.