Civil War And Agrarian Unrest

The first book that compares the Confederate South and Southern Italy in two contemporaneous civil wars during 1861-1865.

This book provides a perspective into the past that few students and historians of the Civil War have considered: agriculture during the Civil War as a key element of power. The Civil War revolutionized the agricultural labor system in the South, and it had dramatic effects on farm labor in the North relating to technology. Agriculture also was an element of power for both sides during the Civil War—one that is often overlooked in traditional studies of the conflict. R. Douglas Hurt argues that Southerners viewed the agricultural productivity of their region as an element of power that would enable them to win the war, while Northern farmers considered their productivity not only an economic benefit to the Union and enhancement of their personal fortunes but also an advantage that would help bring the South back into the Union. This study examines the effects of the Civil War on agriculture for both the Union and the Confederacy from 1860 to 1865, emphasizing how agriculture directly related to the war effort in each region—for example, the efforts made to produce more food for military and civilian populations; attempts to limit cotton production; cotton as a diplomatic tool; the work of women in the fields; slavery as a key agricultural resource; livestock production; experiments to produce cotton, tobacco, and sugar in the North; and the adoption of new implements.

This book studies the changes that have marked war in the Western World since the thirteenth century.

This is the story of how Americans attempted to define what it meant to be a citizen of the United States, at a moment of fracture in the republic's history. As Erik Mathisen demonstrates, prior to the Civil War, American national citizenship amounted to little more than a vague bundle of rights. But during the conflict, citizenship was transformed. Ideas about loyalty emerged as a key to citizenship, and this change presented opportunities and profound challenges aplenty. Confederate citizens would be forced to explain away their act of treason, while African Americans would use their wartime loyalty to the Union as leverage to secure the status of citizens during Reconstruction. In The Loyal Republic, Mathisen sheds new light on the Civil War, American emancipation, and a process in which Americans came to a new relationship with the modern state. Using the Mississippi Valley as his primary focus and charting a history that traverses both sides of the battlefield, Mathisen offers a striking new history of the Civil War and its aftermath, one that ushered in nothing less than a revolution in the meaning of citizenship in the United States.

Between 1861 and 1865, both the Confederate South and Southern Italy underwent dramatic processes of nation-building, with the creation of the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy, in the midst of civil wars. This is the first book that compares these parallel developments by focusing on the Unionist and pro-Bourbon political forces that opposed the two new nations in inner civil conflicts. Overlapping these conflicts were the social revolutions triggered by the rebellions of American slaves and Southern Italian peasants against the slaveholding and landowning elites. Utilizing a comparative perspective, Enrico Dal Lago sheds light on the reasons why these combined factors of internal opposition proved fatal for the Confederacy in the American Civil War, while the Italian Kingdom survived its own civil war. At the heart of this comparison is a desire to understand how and why nineteenth-century nations rose and either endured or disappeared.

The familiar story of the Civil War tells of a predominately agricultural South pitted against a rapidly industrializing North. However, Adam Wesley Dean argues that the Republican Party's political ideology was fundamentally agrarian. Believing that small farms owned by families for generations led to a model society, Republicans supported a northern agricultural ideal in opposition to southern plantation agriculture, which destroyed the land's productivity, required constant western expansion, and produced an elite landed gentry hostile to the Union. Dean shows how agrarian republicanism shaped the debate over slavery's expansion, spurred the creation of the Department of Agriculture and the passage of the Homestead Act, and laid the foundation for the development of the earliest nature parks. Spanning the long nineteenth century, Dean's study analyzes the changing debate over land development as it transitioned from focusing on the creation of a virtuous and orderly citizenry to being seen primarily as a "civilizing" mission. By showing Republicans as men and women with backgrounds in small farming, Dean unveils new connections between seemingly separate historical events, linking this era's views of natural and manmade environments with interpretations of slavery and land policy.

This second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Civil War studies the longer, broader war and its chronology carefully tracks the major events. The introduction then provides a broad overview, describing the contending forces, and showing how the Communists come out on top. The details, and these are crucial, are laid out in over 200 cross-referenced dictionary entries dealing with the opposing forces and parties, the major campaigns and battles, the Long March, and of course the leadership on both sides. This book, one of few such in English, provides a very solid basis for study, but that can be accomplished more effectively by consulting the titles listed in an extensive bibliography.

Historians have come to think on the late nineteenth century as America’s Gilded Age. But in Louisiana it was a time of conflict and repression—turbulent years which engendered the social and political forces that ultimately produced the Huey Long era. Professor William Ivy Hair has captured the essence of Louisiana life and politics during this era, the decades that followed the end of Reconstruction. Using many quotations from newspapers and other relevant sources, the author has recreated in a readable narrative not only the political developments but the flavor of contemporary life and the prevalent emotions of the period. He focuses on the two major opposing forces in the state during the era: the conservative Bourbon oligarchy and the various protest movements of disadvantaged whites and blacks. To provide a background for a perceptive understanding of this political conflict, he undertakes a broad-gauged examination of the social, economic, and racial conditions in the state from 1877 to 1900. Beginning with the sordid story of the events surrounding the end of Reconstruction, Hair examines and analyzes the Democratic oligarchy, the leading personalities involved, and its several factions. He examines the economic and social conditions of both rural and urban Louisiana, and discusses the Greenback-agrarian upheaval of 1878, the larger protest movement that followed, the attempted mass Negro exodus from the state during the so-called “Kansas Fever” of 1879, the spread of the Farmers’ Union and Alliance of the 1880's, and the rise of Populism in the 1890's. Having crushed Greenbackism and related independent movements, Hair says, the Bourbon oligarchy proceeded to fasten upon Louisiana what was probably the most reactionary and least socially responsible regime in the history of the post-Civil War South. Bourbanism and Agrarian Protest combines thorough scholarly research and clear, perceptive writing. It covers every issue and every event of consequence of the era and is an excellent sequel to Roger W. Shugg’s Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana, which treats the period from 1840 to 1875.

Gradually, the moderating influence that parties played in structuring campaigns and the policy process eroded to the point where extreme polarization dominated and decision-making power migrated to the presidency. Weakened parties were increasingly dominated by presidents and their partnerships with social activists, leading to a gridlocked system characterized by the politics of demonization and demagoguery. Executive-centered parties more easily ignore the sorts of moderating voices that had prevailed in an earlier era. While the Republican Party is more susceptible to the dangers of populism than the Democrats, both parties are animated by a presidency-led, movement-centered vision of democracy. After tracing this history, the authors dismiss calls to return to some bygone era. .