The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (15th Anniversary Edition)

by Edward L. Ayers

Overview

At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic Redeemers swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society. The Atlantic called it "one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199886838
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/07/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Edward L. Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond. He was named National Professor of the Year in 2003 and is a Bancroft and the Beveridge Prize winner.

Table of Contents

Junction     3
Election News     34
In Town     55
Dry Goods     81
Mill and Mine     104
In Black and White     132
Faith     160
Out in the Country     187
Alliances     214
Populism     249
Turning of the Tide     283
Reunion and Reaction     310
Books     339
Voices     373
Twentieth Century Limited     409
Epilogue     438
Thoughts on the 15th Anniversary Edition     439
Acknowledgments     445
Appendix     448
Abbreviations Used in Notes     452
Notes     453
Index     562

Editorial Reviews

"Here, at last, is a subtle, compelling view of the late 19th-century South whose scholarship is up-to-date....In a synthesis that captures the late 19th-century South in its bewildering complexity, Ayers does get the New South right."—Washington Post Book World

"The most ambitious, comprehensive, and original survey of post-Reconstruction Southern history to appear since Woodward's Origins.... Ayers's book deepens and enriches our sense of the diversity and complexity of southern life."—George M. Fredrickson, The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher