Synopses & Reviews
Review
[The 18 essays] will be welcomed by specialists in Southern history....[Each] author has in some way shed light on the essential questions of just who the Southern commoners were and how they related to the other constituents of the social structure. Lists of suggested further readings enhance the value of this one-of-a-kind anthology. No serious student of the South should neglect it.Library Journal
Table of Contents
Reflections of "democracy" in revolutionary South Carolina? : the composition of military organizations and the attitudes and relationships of the officers and men, 1775-1780 / Walter J. Fraser, Jr. -- The farmers possess the land / Frank L. Owsley -- The failed mission : the Catholic Church and Black Catholics in the Old South / Randall M. Miller -- Public schools / Guion Griffis Johnson -- Law and order in Savannah, 1850-1860 / Richard H. Haunton -- The structure of the free negro caste in the antebellum United States / Ira Berlin -- The antebellum southern herdsmen : a reinterpretation / Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney -- The effects of slavery upon nonslaveholders / Robert R. Russel -- A middle-class, border-state family during the Civil War / Alden B. Pearson, Jr. -- Against the gentry : an inquiry into a southern lower-class community and culture, 1865-1870 / Edward Magdol -- Race and Reconstruction : Edgefield County, South Carolina / Vernon Burton -- Town and country in the South, 1850-1880 : a comparison of urban and rural social structures / Frank J. Huffman, Jr. -- Of the quest of the golden fleece / W. E. B. Du Bois -- Women in the Southern Farmers' Alliance : a reconsideration of the role and status of women in the late nineteenth-century South / Julie Roy Jeffrey -- "Irrespective of party, color or social standing" : the Knights of Labor and opposition politics in Richmond, Virginia / Leon Fink -- Populist dreams and negro rights : east Texas as a case study / Lawrence C. Goodwyn -- On Goodwyn's Populists / David Montgomery -- Textile workers in a tobacco county : a comparison between yarn and weave mill villagers / Dale Newman.