Science, Race, and Religion in the American South

Science, Race, and Religion in the American South
Author: Lester D. Stephens
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2003-07-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807861197

In the decades before the Civil War, Charleston, South Carolina, enjoyed recognition as the center of scientific activity in the South. By 1850, only three other cities in the United States--Philadelphia, Boston, and New York--exceeded Charleston in natural history studies, and the city boasted an excellent museum of natural history. Examining the scientific activities and contributions of John Bachman, Edmund Ravenel, John Edwards Holbrook, Lewis R. Gibbes, Francis S. Holmes, and John McCrady, Lester Stephens uncovers the important achievements of Charleston's circle of naturalists in a region that has conventionally been dismissed as largely devoid of scientific interests. Stephens devotes particular attention to the special problems faced by the Charleston naturalists and to the ways in which their religious and racial beliefs interacted with and shaped their scientific pursuits. In the end, he shows, cultural commitments proved stronger than scientific principles. When the South seceded from the Union in 1861, the members of the Charleston circle placed regional patriotism above science and union and supported the Confederate cause. The ensuing war had a devastating impact on the Charleston naturalists--and on science in the South. The Charleston circle never fully recovered from the blow, and a century would elapse before the South took an equal role in the pursuit of mainstream scientific research.

Science and Medicine in the Old South

Science and Medicine in the Old South
Author: Ronald Numbers
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1999-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807124956

With a few notable exceptions, historians have tended to ignore the role that science and medicine played in the antebellum South. The fourteen essays in Science and Medicine in the Old South help to redress that neglect by considering scientific and medical developments in the early nineteenth-century South and by showing the ways in which the South’s scientific and medical activities differed from those of other regions. The book is divided into two sections. The essays in the first section examine the broad background of science in the South between 1830 and 1860; the second section addresses medicine specifically. The essays frequently counterpoint each other. In the first section, Ronald Numbers and Janet Numbers argue that he South’s failure to “keep pace” with the North in scientific areas resulted from demographic factors. William Scarborough asserts that slavery produced a social structure that encouraged agricultural and political careers rather than scientific and industrial ones. Charles Dew offers a strong indictment of slavery, suggesting that the conservative influence of the institution severely discouraged the adoption of modern technologies. Other essays examine institutions of higher learning in the South, southern scientific societies, and the relationship between science and theology. The section on medicine in the Old South also examines the ways in which the medical needs and practices of the Old South were both similar to and distinct from those of other regions. K. David Patterson argues that slavery in effect imported African diseases into the Southeast and created a “modified West African disease environment.” James H. Cassedy points out that land-management policies determined by slavery—land clearing, soil exhaustion—also helped created a distinctive disease environment. Other contributors discuss southern public health problems, domestic medicine, slave folk beliefs, and the special medical needs of blacks. Science and Medicine in the Old South is a long-overdue examination of these segments of the southern cultural milieu. These essays will do much to clarify misconceptions about the time and the region; moreover, they suggest directions for future research.

Joseph Jones, M.D.

Joseph Jones, M.D.
Author: James O. Breeden
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0813194407

Of the many books written over the past century about the Old South and the American Civil War, a very few explore the scientific history of the South or the medical history of the war itself. In the first volume of this impressive biography of Joseph Jones, Mr. Breeden does much to illuminate the development of scientific thought and of medicine in the nineteenth-century South. Jones was far in advance of most of his fellow physicians. The thoroughness of his research, the tenacity of his effort, and the brilliance of his findings won him respect while he was still a very young scholar. When the war came, he showed himself fiercely patriotic as a soldier but coldly empirical as a scientific investigator of many infectious diseases. In the course of the biography the author illumines the development of modern medicine in this country and the state of the nation's medical schools in the middle of the nineteenth century. The greater part of this volume is devoted to Jones's wartime service, which was mainly behind the battle lines in the hospitals and prison camps. The growth of the problem of gangrene among the wounded—a horrifying result of overcrowding and lack of sanitation—is examined in particularly telling detail; the ravaging of the Andersonville prison camp by this and other diseases was the subject of some of Jones's most controversial research, and his written report as a reluctant witness in the trial of the Southerners held responsible. At the outset of the war, Joseph Jones was an energetic and well trained young doctor with considerable experience in teaching and research; by its end he was perhaps the foremost expert on infectious diseases in the South or in the nation.

Africans in the Old South

Africans in the Old South
Author: Randy J. Sparks
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674495160

The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, and its toll in lives damaged or destroyed is incalculable. Most of those stories are lost to history, making the few that can be reconstructed critical to understanding the trade in all its breadth and variety. Randy J. Sparks examines the experiences of a range of West Africans who lived in the American South between 1740 and 1860. Their stories highlight the diversity of struggles that confronted every African who arrived on American shores. The subjects of Africans in the Old South include Elizabeth Cleveland Hardcastle, the mixed-race daughter of an African slave-trading family who invested in South Carolina rice plantations and slaves, passed as white, and integrated herself into the Lowcountry planter elite; Robert Johnson, kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery in Georgia, who later learned English, won his freedom, and joined the abolition movement in the North; Dimmock Charlton, who bought his freedom after being illegally enslaved in Savannah; and a group of unidentified Africans who were picked up by a British ship in the Caribbean, escaped in Mobile’s port, and were recaptured and eventually returned to their homeland. These exceptional lives challenge long-held assumptions about how the slave trade operated and who was involved. The African Atlantic was a complex world characterized by constant movement, intricate hierarchies, and shifting identities. Not all Africans who crossed the Atlantic were enslaved, nor was the voyage always one-way.

Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South

Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South
Author: Paul Finkelman
Publisher: Macmillan Higher Education
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2019-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1319169295

This new edition of Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South introduces the vast number of ways in which educated Southern thinkers and theorists defended the institution of slavery. This book collects and explores the elaborately detailed pro-slavery arguments rooted in religion, law, politics, science, and economics. In his introduction, now updated to include the relationship between early Christianity and slavery, Paul Finkelman discusses how early world societies legitimized slavery, the distinction between Northern and Southern ideas about slavery, and how the ideology of the American Revolution prompted the need for a defense of slavery. The rich collection of documents allows for a thorough examination of these ideas through poems, images, speeches, correspondences, and essays. This edition features two new documents that highlight women’s voices and the role of women in the movement to defend slavery plus a visual document that demonstrates how the notion of black inferiority and separateness was defended through the science of the time. Document headnotes and a chronology, plus updated questions for consideration and selected bibliography help students engage with the documents to understand the minds of those who defended slavery. Available in print and e-book formats.

The New Negro in the Old South

The New Negro in the Old South
Author: Gabriel A. Briggs
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2015-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813574803

Standard narratives of early twentieth-century African American history credit the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern metropolises for the emergence of the New Negro, an educated, upwardly mobile sophisticate very different from his forebears. Yet this conventional history overlooks the cultural accomplishments of an earlier generation, in the black communities that flourished within southern cities immediately after Reconstruction. In this groundbreaking historical study, Gabriel A. Briggs makes the compelling case that the New Negro first emerged long before the Great Migration to the North. The New Negro in the Old South reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, demonstrating how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades. Drawing from extensive archival research, Briggs investigates what made Nashville so unique and reveals how it served as a formative environment for major black intellectuals like Sutton Griggs and W.E.B. Du Bois. The New Negro in the Old South makes the past come alive as it vividly recounts little-remembered episodes in black history, from the migration of Colored Infantry veterans in the late 1860s to the Fisk University protests of 1925. Along the way, it gives readers a new appreciation for the sophistication, determination, and bravery of African Americans in the decades between the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance.

Who We Are and How We Got Here

Who We Are and How We Got Here
Author: David Reich
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2018-03-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0192554387

The past few years have seen a revolution in our ability to map whole genome DNA from ancient humans. With the ancient DNA revolution, combined with rapid genome mapping of present human populations, has come remarkable insights into our past. This important new data has clarified and added to our knowledge from archaeology and anthropology, helped resolve long-existing controversies, challenged long-held views, and thrown up some remarkable surprises. The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations existing today are mixes of ancient ones, as well as in many cases carrying a genetic component from Neanderthals, and, in some populations, Denisovans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what the genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising ancestry. Gone are old ideas of any kind of racial 'purity', or even deep and ancient divides between peoples. Instead, we are finding a rich variety of mixtures. Reich describes the cutting-edge findings from the past few years, and also considers the sensitivities involved in tracing ancestry, with science sometimes jostling with politics and tradition. He brings an important wider message: that we should celebrate our rich diversity, and recognize that every one of us is the result of a long history of migration and intermixing of ancient peoples, which we carry as ghosts in our DNA. What will we discover next?

Life and Labor in the Old South

Life and Labor in the Old South
Author: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2007
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781570036781

Celebrated as a classic work of historical literature, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929) represents the culmination of three decades of research and reflection on the social and economic systems of the antebellum South by the leading historian of African American slavery of the first half of the twentieth century. Life and Labor in the Old South represents both the strengths and weaknesses of first-rate scholarship by whites on the topics of antebellum African and African American slavery during the Jim Crow era. Deeply researched in primary sources, carefully focused on social and economic facets of slavery, and gracefully written, Phillips's germinal account set the standard for his contemporaries. Simultaneously the work is rife with elitism, racism, and reliance on sources that privilege white perspectives. Such contradictions between its content and viewpoint have earned Life and Labor in the Old South its place at the forefront of texts in the historiography of the antebellum South and African American slavery. The book is both a work of high scholarship and an example of the power of unexamined prejudices to affect such a work.

Honor and Violence in the Old South

Honor and Violence in the Old South
Author: Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1986
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780195042429

Hailed as a classic by reviewers and historians, Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor now appears in abridged form under the title Honor and Violence in the Old South. Winner of a Phi Alpha Theta Book Award and a Jefferson Davis Memorial Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, this is the first major reinterpretation of Southern life and custom since W.J, Cash's The Mind of the South. It explores the meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites—both slaveholders and non-slaveholders—applied it to their lives. Wyatt-Brown ranges widely—covering topics such as childbearing, marital patterns, duelling, slave discipline, and lynch-law—to discover the role of honor in the psyche of white Southerners.

Railroads in the Old South

Railroads in the Old South
Author: Aaron W. Marrs
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2009-03-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801891302

Aaron W. Marrs challenges the accepted understanding of economic and industrial growth in antebellum America with this original study of the history of the railroad in the Old South. Drawing from both familiar and overlooked sources, such as the personal diaries of Southern travelers, papers and letters from civil engineers, corporate records, and contemporary newspaper accounts, Marrs skillfully expands on the conventional business histories that have characterized scholarship in this field. He situates railroads in the fullness of antebellum life, examining how slavery, technology, labor, social convention, and the environment shaped their evolution. Far from seeing the Old South as backward and premodern, Marrs finds evidence of urban life, industry, and entrepreneurship throughout the region. But these signs of progress existed alongside efforts to preserve traditional ways of life. Railroads exemplified Southerners' pursuit of progress on their own terms: developing modern transportation while retaining a conservative social order. Railroads in the Old South demonstrates that a simple approach to the Old South fails to do justice to its complexity and contradictions. -- Dr. Owen Brown and Dr. Gale E. Gibson