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Big Mules And Branchheads
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Book Synopsis Big Mules and Branchheads by : Carl Grafton
Download or read book Big Mules and Branchheads written by Carl Grafton and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A passion for politics and for political power is at the core of this biography of "Big Jim" Folsom, the legendary two-term Alabama governor who revolutionized state government by going directly to the "branchheads," the grassroots, to exhort the powerless to fight for their rights against the "Big Mules," the elite cotton planters and urban industrialists. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with Folsom, his family and friends, and his allies and rivals, Carl Grafton and Anne Permaloff reveal in Big Mules and Branchheads the complex reality behind the stories and myths that have arisen around the Alabama governor. Often dismissed as a naïve yet somehow appealing yokel whose rise to power was largely attributable to luck, Folsom is seen here as a highly knowledgeable and creative political strategist who calculated his most important victories even while his behavior often seemed influenced by innocence and a tendency toward buffoonery. His two terms as governor were marked by scandal, yet Folsom energetically sought to raise the moral level of Alabama politics by bluntly advocating, in the face of great opposition, the expansion of civil rights for blacks, poor whites, and women. Folsom, the authors suggest, is as widely misunderstood in Alabama as Alabama is misunderstood throughout the nation. Illuminating the intricacies of Alabama's politics as it traces Folsom's rise to power, this book gives readers the unique opportunity to know the legendary Folsom as a flawed, yet often inspiring human being who energetically practiced his own colorful brand of politics.
Book Synopsis Political Power in Alabama by : Anne Permaloff
Download or read book Political Power in Alabama written by Anne Permaloff and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008-12-01 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Power in Alabama is the sequel to Anne Permaloff and Carl Grafton's Big Mules and Branchheads, a biography of the populist governor "Big Jim" Folsom. Encompassing the years from 1958 to 1970 and the gubernatorial terms of John Patterson, George Wallace, Lurleen Wallace, and Albert Brewer, the present volume offers a full account of the breakup of the Big Mule Alliance, the elite coalition of Alabama's largest industrial and agricultural interests, and the subsequent effects on the state's political environment. Dominating Alabama politics for most of the century through disenfranchisement and control of the legislature, the "Big Mules" wanted low taxes, a minimally effective school system, no effective labor unions, a small electorate, and racial segregation. By 1958, however, the Big Mules' urban and rural elements had grown disaffected with one another, and outside forces were driving them apart. In a few years, the legislature and the electorate would be drastically restructured. Although this period could have been a time to set new policy directions for the state, say Permaloff and Grafton, many opportunities for change were squandered, establishing the politics of Alabama today and the problems facing the state. Political Power in Alabama covers an extraordinarily complex set of issues and events, including the civil rights struggle, urban-rural disparities, the lack of party competition, the structure of the tax system, and the economic and cultural gaps separating Alabama and the rest of the South from the nation.
Book Synopsis "Everybody was Black Down There" by : Robert H. Woodrum
Download or read book "Everybody was Black Down There" written by Robert H. Woodrum and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1930 almost 13,000 African Americans worked in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama. They made up 53 percent of the mining workforce and some 60 percent of their union's local membership. At the close of the twentieth century, only about 15 percent of Birmingham's miners were black, and the entire mining workforce had been sharply reduced. Robert H. Woodrum offers a challenging interpretation of why this dramatic decline occurred and why it happened during an era of strong union presence in the Alabama coalfields. Drawing on union, company, and government records as well as interviews with coal miners, Woodrum examines the complex connections between racial ideology and technological and economic change. Extending the chronological scope of previous studies of race, work, and unionization in the Birmingham coalfields, Woodrum covers the New Deal, World War II, the postwar era, the 1970s expansion of coalfield employment, and contemporary trends toward globalization. The United Mine Workers of America's efforts to bridge the color line in places like Birmingham should not be underestimated, says Woodrum. Facing pressure from the wider world of segregationist Alabama, however, union leadership ultimately backed off the UMWA's historic commitment to the rights of its black members. Woodrum discusses the role of state UMWA president William Mitch in this process and describes Birmingham's unique economic circumstances as an essentially Rust Belt city within the burgeoning Sun Belt South. This is a nuanced exploration of how, despite their central role in bringing the UMWA back to Alabama in the early 1930s, black miners remained vulnerable to the economic and technological changes that transformed the coal industry after World War II.
Book Synopsis The Politics of White Rights by : Joseph Bagley
Download or read book The Politics of White Rights written by Joseph Bagley and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Politics of White Rights, Joseph Bagley recounts the history of school desegregation litigation in Alabama, focusing on the malleability and durability of white resistance. He argues that the litigious battles of 1954-73 taught Alabama's segregationists how to fashion a more subtle defense of white privilege, placing them in the vanguard of a new conservatism oriented toward the Sunbelt, not the South. Scholars have recently begun uncovering the ways in which segregationists abandoned violent backlash and overt economic reprisal and learned how to rearticulate their resistance and blind others to their racial motivations. Bagley is most interested in a creedal commitment to maintaining "law and order," which lay at the heart of this transition. Before it was a buzz phrase meant to conjure up fears of urban black violence, "law and order" represented a politics that allowed self-styled white moderates to begrudgingly accept token desegregation and to begin to stake their own claims to constitutional rights without forcing them to repudiate segregation or white supremacy. Federal courts have, as recently as 2014, agreed that Alabama's property tax system is crippling black education. Bagley argues that this is because, in the late 1960s, the politics of law and order became a politics of white rights, which supported not only white flight to suburbs and private schools but also nominally color-blind changes in the state's tax code. These changes were designed to shield white money from the needs of increasingly black public education. Activists and courts have been powerless to do anything about them, because twenty years of desperate litigious combat finally taught Alabama lawmakers how to erect constitutional bulwarks that could withstand a legal assault.
Book Synopsis I'd Fight the World by : Peter La Chapelle
Download or read book I'd Fight the World written by Peter La Chapelle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-09-11 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “educational, interesting, and very easy to read” history of the bond between country music and politics in America (Harry Reid). Long before the United States had presidents from the world of movies and reality TV, we had scores of politicians with connections to country music. In I’d Fight the World, Peter La Chapelle traces the deep bonds between country music and politics, from the nineteenth-century rise of fiddler-politicians to more recent figures like Pappy O’Daniel, Roy Acuff, and Rob Quist. These performers and politicians both rode and resisted cultural waves: some advocated for the poor and dispossessed, and others voiced religious and racial anger, but they all walked the line between exploiting their celebrity and righteously taking on the world. La Chapelle vividly shows how country music campaigners have profoundly influenced the American political landscape. Praise for I’d Fight the World “Thoroughly researched and insightful, I’d Fight the World exposes the political themes embedded in country music of all stripes, as well as the sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant, always shrewd employment of this music by politicians. La Chapelle reveals a political legacy in country music that today’s audiences have an obligation to confront.” —Jocelyn Neal, author of Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History “In this well-written and expansive book, La Chapelle narrates a national history of politics and country music, from nineteenth-century populism to post–World War II conservatism. I’d Fight the World demonstrates how both political and cultural history can shine light upon each other, creating a rich tapestry of scholarship.” —David Gilbert, author of The Product of Our Souls “Lively and informative. . . . This book will surprise those who have preconceived notions about country music and Southern politicians, and their longstanding connection.” —Library Journal “A deeply researched examination of the ways that country and old-time music have been coopted into political life. . . . La Chapelle traces the not especially healthy relationship between country music and populism. . . . La Chapelle’s exhaustive examination of his subject uncovers many untold stories and raises interesting questions about whether country music has yet truly reckoned with its political past.” —Times Literary Supplement
Book Synopsis The Politics of Rage by : Dan T. Carter
Download or read book The Politics of Rage written by Dan T. Carter and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2000-02-01 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining biography with regional and national history, Dan T. Carter chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of George Wallace, a populist who abandoned his ideals to become a national symbol of racism, and later begged for forgiveness. In The Politics of Rage, Carter argues persuasively that the four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate helped to establish the conservative political movement that put Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and gave Newt Gingrich and the Republicans control of Congress in 1994. In this second edition, Carter updates Wallace’s story with a look at the politician’s death and the nation’s reaction to it and gives a summary of his own sense of the legacy of “the most important loser in twentieth-century American politics.”
Download or read book Dixie Redux written by Raymond Arsenault and published by NewSouth Books. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney is a collection of original essays written by some of the nation’s most distinguished historians. Each of the contributors has a personal as well as a professional connection to Sheldon Hackney, a distinguished scholar in his own right who has served as Provost of Princeton University, president of Tulane University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In a variety of roles–teacher, mentor, colleague, administrator, writer, and friend–Sheldon Hackney has been a source of wisdom, empowerment, and wise counsel during more than four decades of historical and educational achievement. His life, both inside and outside the academy, has focused on issues closely related to civil rights, social justice, and the vagaries of race, class, regional culture, and national identity. Each of the essays in this volume touches upon one or more of these important issues–themes that have animated Sheldon Hackney’s scholarly and professional life.
Book Synopsis Race and the Origins of American Neoliberalism by : Randolph Hohle
Download or read book Race and the Origins of American Neoliberalism written by Randolph Hohle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did the United States forsake its support for public works projects, public schools, public spaces, and high corporate taxes for the neoliberal project that uses the state to benefit businesses at the expense of citizens? The short answer to this question is race. This book argues that the white response to the black civil rights movement in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s inadvertently created the conditions for emergence of American neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the result of an unlikely alliance of an elite liberal business class and local segregationists that sought to preserve white privilege in the civil rights era. The white response drew from a language of neoliberalism, as they turned inward to redefine what it meant to be a good white citizen. The language of neoliberalism depoliticized class tensions by getting whites to identify as white first, and as part of a social class second. This book explores the four pillars of neoliberal policy, austerity, privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts, and explains how race created the pretext for the activation of neoliberal policy. Neoliberalism is not about free markets. It is about controlling the state to protect elite white economic privileges.
Book Synopsis Dixie Heretic by : Tennant McWilliams
Download or read book Dixie Heretic written by Tennant McWilliams and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dixie Heretic is a life-and-times biography of the minister and social reformer Renwick C. Kennedy (1900-1985), an impassioned, tortured man who strove ardently to make his white Alabama congregants 'more Christian' by acknowledging their own racism and greed, and who not only lived but chronicled carefully many of the forces culminating in the right-wing conservative movement today. As McWilliams relates, Kennedy came from 'upcountry' South Carolina, a place rife with Scotch-Irish Associate Reformed Presbyterians. They lived by biblical infallibility and a strain of individual piety and salvation focused on the hereafter. In the early 1920s, however, his ministerial studies took him to Princeton Theological Seminary. There, he encountered the 'Presbyterian Conflict' over science, fundamentalism, and the social gospel, and he emerged a radical Christian socialist. Like a few other articulate practitioners of 'Neo-orthodoxy,' young Kennedy stayed true to the literalist Bible, and the salvation and piety allegiances of his youth. But he embraced not only the Social Gospel's mandate to solve earthly problems of poverty and prejudice but many cardinal tenets of modern science, as well. To Kennedy, this posed no contradiction. In 1927 Kennedy moved to Camden, Alabama, the seat of Wilcox County, where he soon married and started a family. Meanwhile, his ministry for social change dominated his Wilcox pastorates, filled with the very people from whom he derived: the Scotch-Irish. Quietly, he came to believe that God had a mandate for him: to confront and change the behaviors and beliefs of his congregations, notably their attitudes about race and poverty. And to do this, he found, he had to attack what he considered traditionalist Christian hypocrisy - 'half Christianity,' or non-social gospel Christianity - some of which he came to see as a form of proto-fascism, if not fascism itself. He soon turned to penning confrontational short stories, many published in Christian Century and some in the New Republic and set in his fictitious 'Yaupon County.' In some of these stories he overtly revealed his allegiances as a Social Gospel Christian and as an adamant supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic party. He spared no one, not even members of his own congregation. He also abandoned his pacifism and urged US intervention in World War II: he hoped that the defeat of racial fascism abroad might somehow grow white hearts at home. Ultimately, to help eliminate 'the anti-Christ, the mad dog, Hitler,' Kennedy joined the U.S. Army. As a chaplain with the famed 102nd Evacuation Hospital, he experienced some of the most horrific chapters of the conflict - Saint Lo, the Battle of the Bulge - and arrived at Dachau a mere week after German soldiers fled. The postwar world gave Kennedy periods of optimism and hope. He returned from the war believing America might deal with its own racial issues the way it had treated Europe and Japan's. His own children grew into educated, enlightened, and thriving adults. And new developments in his professional life brought considerable increases to his family income, easing his wife's long financial insecurities. Yet these years also offered a great many frustrations. Even by 1948 he knew his Social Gospel hopes about racism, fascism, and white entitlement, especially among his fellow Scotch-Irish, were naïve at best. The rise of the Dixiecrat movement (a key Dixiecrat leader, Alabama State senator J. Miller Bonner, was a member of his own congregation), only deepened his sense of personal defeat. Even so, the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and occasional developments in state and national politics rekindled at least some of his old Neo-orthodox hope and drive. He played a significant role in desegregating Troy State University, for instance, but the gratifications of even small victories proved fleeting, dashed by the assassinations of Dr. King, JFK, and RFK, and the growing numbers of southern white Republicans and Wallaceites. In Kennedy's increasing 'down' times he was privately the self-professed 'Christian and a Democrat' seeing national Republicans as 'sinners' for their growing embrace of white southern racial conservatives. A long-term 'functional alcoholic,' this privately persistent Neo-orthodox Christian never ceased agonizing over the growing 'half-Christianity' around him. Indeed, he died worrying about what it portended for the role of white supremist, proto-fascists in modern America, aware of having made few inroads on God's mandate and what he considered white Christian wrongs in Alabama. While Renwick Kennedy was front-loaded for the failure he indeed found, still - in the values and social norms he pondered and challenged at every stage of his life, and today so badly in need of recommitment - he stands as a 'good' citizen, a non-hypocritical Christian, and an emblem of hope"--
Book Synopsis The Constitutionalism of American States by : George E. Connor
Download or read book The Constitutionalism of American States written by George E. Connor and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This comparative study of state constitutions offers insightful overviews of the general and specific problems that have confronted America's constitution writers since the country's founding. Each chapter reflects the constitutional theory and history of a single state, encompassing each document's structure, content, and evolution"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book A War of Sections written by Steve Suitts and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2023-10 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping reinterpretation of the history of disfranchisement, Steve Suitts illuminates how a century of political conflicts in Alabama came to shape both some of America's best achievements in voting rights and its continuing struggles over voter suppression. A War of Sections tells the unknown political history symbolized today by the annual pilgrimage of presidents and celebrities across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It is the story of how that crucial, tragic day in Selma in 1965 was only the flashpoint of a much longer history of failures and successes involving conflicts not only between blacks and whites in Alabama but between white political factions warring in the state over voting rights. Suitts recasts the context and much of the content of disfranchisement in Alabama as an unremitting, decades-long sectional battle in white-only politics between the state's rural Black Belt and north Alabama counties. He uncovers important Black and white heroes and villains who collectively shaped the arc of voting rights in Alabama and ultimately across the nation. A War of Sections offers a new understanding of the political dynamics of resistance and change through which a southern state's long-standing democratic failures ironically provided motivation for and instruction to a reluctant nation regarding unmatched ways to advance universal voting. Along the way, the book introduces from this unheard past some prophetic voices that speak to the paramount issues of America's commitment to the universal right to vote-then and now.
Book Synopsis The Life and Death of the Solid South by : Dewey W. Grantham
Download or read book The Life and Death of the Solid South written by Dewey W. Grantham and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southern-style politics was one of those peculiar institutions that differentiated the South from other American regions. This system—long referred to as the Solid South—embodied a distinctive regional culture and was perpetuated through an undemocratic distribution of power and a structure based on disfranchisement, malapportioned legislatures, and one-party politics. It was the mechanism that determined who would govern in the states and localities, and in national politics it was the means through which the South's politicians defended their region's special interests and political autonomy. The history of this remarkable institution can be traced in the gradual rise, long persistence, and ultimate decline of the Democratic Party dominance in the land below the Potomac and the Ohio. This is the story that Dewey W. Grantham tells in his fresh and authoritative account of the South's modern political experience. The distillation of many years of research and reflection, is both a synthesis of the extensive literature on politics in the recent South and a challenging reinterpretation of the region's political history.
Book Synopsis The Great Melding by : Glenn Feldman
Download or read book The Great Melding written by Glenn Feldman and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Road to America's New Conservatism is the second book in Glenn Feldman's groundbreaking series on how the American South switched its allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party in the twentieth century.
Book Synopsis New Directions in Civil Rights Studies by : Armstead L. Robinson
Download or read book New Directions in Civil Rights Studies written by Armstead L. Robinson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By reassessing the history of the civil rights movement and examining questions and areas of research that need to be addressed by future studies, New Directions in Civil Rights Studies challenges students of the civil rights movement to broaden their vision and, at the same time, to look more closely at the people, the communities, and the networks that provide the rich texture of the movement's history.
Book Synopsis The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement by : Brian Ward
Download or read book The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement written by Brian Ward and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the development of African American political though since the 1960s, The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement offers a new look at the contemporary legacy of the civil rights movement.
Download or read book Fog of War written by Kevin M. Kruse and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-02 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is a timely reconsideration of the intersection between two of the dominant events of twentieth-century American history, the upheaval wrought by the Second World War and the social revolution brought about by the African American struggle for equality. Scholars from a wide range of fields explore the impact of war on the longer history of African American protest from many angles: from black veterans to white segregationists, from the rural South to northern cities, from popular culture to federal politics, and from the American confrontations to international connections. It is well known that World War II gave rise to human rights rhetoric, discredited a racist regime abroad, and provided new opportunities for African Americans to fight, work, and demand equality at home. It would be all too easy to assume that the war was a key stepping stone to the modern civil rights movement. But the authors show that in reality the momentum for civil rights was not so clear cut, with activists facing setbacks as well as successes and their opponents finding ways to establish more rigid defenses for segregation. While the war set the scene for a mass movement, it also narrowed some of the options for black activists.
Book Synopsis The New South, 1945-1980 by : Numan V. Bartley
Download or read book The New South, 1945-1980 written by Numan V. Bartley and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1955 to wide acclaim, T. Harry Williams' P.G.T. Beauregard is universally regarded as "the first authoritative portrait of the Confederacy's always dramatic, often perplexing" general (Chicago Tribune). Chivalric, arrogant, and of exotic Creole Louisiana origin, Beauregard participated in every phase of the Civil War from its beginning to its end. He rigidly adhered to principles of war derived from his studies of Jomini and Napoleon, and yet many of his battle plans were rejected by his superiors, who regarded him as excitable, unreliable, and contentious. After the war, Beauregard was almost the only prominent Confederate general who adapted successfully to the New South, running railroads and later supervising the notorious Louisiana Lottery. This paradox of a man who fought gallantly to defend the Old South and then helped industrialize it is the fascinating subject of Williams' superb biography.
