Bøger af Paul D. Escott

In April 1865 Abraham Lincoln announced his support for voting rights for at least some of the newly freed enslaved people. Paul Escott takes this milestone as an opportunity to explore popular sentiment in the North on this issue and to examine the vigorous efforts of Black leaders to organise, demand, and work for their equal rights as citizens.

Lays bare the contrast between progress on emancipation and the persistence of white supremacy in the Civil War North. Paul Escott analyses northern politics, as well as the racial attitudes revealed in the era's literature, to expose the nearly ubiquitous racism that flourished in all of American society and culture.

Focuses on the challenge that the South's widespread political ideals presented to Jefferson Davis and on the way growing class resentments among citizens in the countryside affected the war effort. The book offers a fresh look at the pivotal role that strong leadership plays in the establishment of a new nation.

The Civil War forced America finally to confront the contradiction between its founding values and human slavery. At the center of this historic confrontation was Abraham Lincoln. By the time this Illinois politician had risen to the office of president, the dilemma of slavery had expanded to the question of all African Americans' future. In this fascinating new book Paul Escott considers the evolution of the president's thoughts on race in relation to three other, powerful--and often conflicting--voices. Lincoln's fellow Republicans Charles Sumner and Montgomery Blair played crucial roles in the shaping of their party. While both Sumner and Blair were opposed to slavery, their motivations reflected profoundly different approaches to the issue. Blair's antislavery stance stemmed from a racist dedication to remove African Americans from the country altogether. Sumner, in contrast, opposed slavery as a crusader for racial equality and a passionate abolitionist. Lincoln maintained close personal relationships with both men as he wrestled with the slavery question. In addition to these antislavery voices, Escott also weaves into his narrative the other extreme, of which Lincoln was politically aware: the virulent racism and hierarchical values that motivated not only the Confederates but surprisingly many Northerners and which were embodied by the president's eventual assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Sumner, Blair, and violent racists like Booth each represent forces with which Lincoln had to contend as he presided over a brutal civil war and faced the issues of slavery and equality lying at its root. Other books and films have provided glimpses of the atmosphere in which the president created his Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln's Dilemma evokes more fully and brings to life the men Lincoln worked with, and against, as he moved racial equality forward.A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era

Spain and the United States both experienced extremely bloody and divisive civil wars that left social and emotional wounds, many of which still endure today. In Uncommonly Savage, award-winning historian Paul Escott considers the impact of internecine violence on memory and ideology, politics, and process of reconciliation.

The South often seems like a foreign country to newcomers from other parts of the United States. And for people from other countries, Southern customs and lifestyle can be even more bewildering. For anyone who has ever wondered why the style of conducting busines in the South is different or why some Southerners are still fighting the Civil War, this book will be a valuable guide. The informative and entertaining essays will help new Southerners understand and appreciate the region and its people, and they will also serve as a refresher course on the South for those who are comfortably settled in.Each of the essays adopts a different perspective to suggest just how the South is different from other American regions. In turn, they examine the special meaning of history for Southerners, the boundaries of the South as a geographical and as an imaginary region, the rhetoric and the reality of Southern race relations, the South's change from a rural to a metropolitan culture, the myth of the Southern belle and the reality of Southern women's lives, the political metamorphosis that turned the Solid South into the Solid Republican South, and the recent transformation of the poorest region in the country into an economic wonder called the Sunbelt.Readers will learn that when Southerners ask strangers what church they attend, the intent is not to pry but to be friendly. They will also discover that "e;where the kudzu grows"e; is one of the best ways to define where the South is located.The essays offer the insights of both shcolarship and experience, for the contributors -- most of them originally non-Southerners -- learned about this region by living in it as well as studying it.The contributors are Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Paul D. Escott, David R. Goldfield, Nell Irvin Painter, John Shelton Reed, and Thomas E. Terrill.

Examines the nature of North Carolina's social system, particularly race and class relations, power, and inequality, during the last half of the nineteenth century. Paul Escott portrays North Carolina's major social groups, focusing on the elite, the ordinary white farmers or workers, and the blacks, and analyses their attitudes, social structure, and power relationships.

Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives

A sharp-edged and revealing account of the transforming struggle for Southern independence and the inherent contradictions that undermined that effort.

Part of a series which examines the complex relationship between the US government, the US military, and the civilian population in wartime and peacetime, this work analyzes the militarization of life in the Confederacy. It probes the relationships between military commanders, legislators, and Jefferson Davis and his administration.

Based on a broad range of contemporary newspapers, magazines, books, army records, government documents, publications of citizens' organizations, letters, diaries, and other sources, this title examines the attitudes and actions of Northerners and Southerners regarding the future of African Americans after the end of slavery.