Forging A New South

"John T. Wilder was an entrepreneur, Civil War general, and business leader who would become influential in the development of post-Civil War Chattanooga. A northern transplant who made his early fortune in the iron industry, Wilder would gain notoriety in the Western Theater through his victories at the battles of Chattanooga, Chickamauga, and throughout the Tullahoma and Atlanta Campaigns while leading the famous "Lightning Brigade." After the Civil War, he relocated to Chattanooga and began the Roane Iron Company and fostered southern ironworks throughout the southeast. He was elected mayor of Chattanooga but would fail to be elected to Congress as its representative. Finally, he was instrumental in the establishment of national military parks in Chattanooga and Chickamauga. Nicely's biography captures the life of a man important to the overall development of Chattanooga and East Tennessee and argues that Wilder was influential in bringing both northern and immigrant populations to the area"--

On the morning of August 21, 1861, John T. Wilder, a brash young colonel of a Union mounted infantry unit nicknamed the “Lightning Brigade” ordered his men to open fire on the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, damaging buildings, sinking steamboats along the riverfront, and injuring men, women, and children. In the midst of Reconstruction and an emerging new South a mere eight years later, Wilder was elected mayor of Chattanooga. While Wilder is most closely associated with the Lightning Brigade, which helped to pioneer the use of both mounted infantry and repeating firearms during the American Civil War, his military accomplishments occupied only five years of his eighty-seven year life. His immense postwar success, however, left a permanent mark on the industrial development of the war-torn South in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is the comprehensive picture of Wilder’s nearly nine decades that Maury Nicely seeks to capture in Forging a New South: The Life of General John T. Wilder. “For many war heroes, there was not much beyond the war worth telling,” Nicely writes. “Such was not the case with Wilder.” A successful entrepreneur and industrialist, after the war Wilder relocated to East Tennessee, where he created dozens of businesses, factories, mines, hotels, and towns; was elected mayor of the city he had shelled during the war; and cultivated close personal and business relationships with Federal and Confederate veterans alike, helping to create a new South in the wake of a devastating conflict. Presented in two parts and accompanied by more than sixty detailed photographs and maps, Nicely’s balanced study fills a significant void—the first complete biography of General John T. Wilder.

For black women in antebellum Charleston, freedom was not a static legal category but a fragile and contingent experience. In this deeply researched social history, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers analyzes the ways in which black women in Charleston acquired, de

This book, first published in 2000, analyzes the role of economically marginalized people in recent transitions to democratic rule.

Forging A Fateful Alliance is an important study of the Vietnam War and American higher education-- revealing how secret and semi-secret institutional involvement in that conflict led to public disclosures that undermined the integrity of academe. After Indochina's de facto division in 1954, Michigan State University offered South Vietnam an array of technical support as part of the "nation-building" program. This support included developing a viable national public administrative structure and, at the same time, training South Vietnam's notorious military police. In return for these services, the U.S. government provided the university with generous clandestine and open financial remuneration -- money that the university would use to expand academic programs, construct new facilities, and fuel its dramatic growth. In the end, however, the arrangement proved to be a Faustian bargain. Like many universities, MSU was accused of being a tool of Cold War foreign policy, of sending professors abroad to staff grandiose "outreach" programs that were based more on ideology than on scholarship or research. Ultimately, flaws inherent in the nation- building scheme, including its failure to address cultural differences or recognize the massive corruption in South Vietnam's government, foreshadowed the enormity of the tragedy that occurred in Southeast Asia after 1965.

This book is the first to trace the fortunes of the earliest large free black community in the U.S. Nash shows how black Philadelphians struggled to shape a family life, gain occupational competence, organize churches, establish social networks, advance cultural institutions, educate their children, and train leaders who would help abolish slavery.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/ women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.

Reinterpreting the emergence of the Soviet state, Holquist situates the Bolshevik Revolution within the continuum of mobilization and violence that began with World War I and extended through Russia's civil war, thereby providing a genealogy for Bolshevik political practices that places them clearly among Russian and European wartime measures.

Tyrannicide uses a captivating story of the escape of thirty-four slaves from a British privateer to unpack the experiences of slavery and slave law in South Carolina and Massachusetts during the Revolutionary Era, highlighting differences and foreshadowing the Civil War.

Gujarat lies at the confluence of communities, commerce, and cultures. As the modern Indian state of Gujarat marks its fiftieth year in 2010, this book charts its coalescence into a distinct political and linguistic unit roughly five hundred years ago. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, Gujarat's cosmopolitan coastline and productive hinterland were held together in a contested unity which nurtured the political integration of the region's pastoralists, peasants, soldiers and artisans, and the evolution of the Gujarati language. Forging a Region explores the creation of Gujarat's unified identity, culminating under a lineage of sultans who united eastern Gujarat and Saurashtra by military action and economic pragmatism in the fifteenth century. Delineating the evolution of the Gujarati political order alongside networks of trade and religion, Samira Sheikh examines how Gujarat's renowned entrepreneurial ethos and dominant discourses on pacifism, vegetarianism, and austerity coexisted, then as now, with a martial pastoralist order. She argues that the religious diversity of medieval Gujarat facilitated economic and political cooperation leading to its cosmopolitan ethos. Sifting through Persian, medieval Gujarati, and Sanskrit sources, Sheikh addresses the long-term history of communities and politics in Gujarat to provide an understanding of the past and present of the region.