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  [Introduction to] A House Divided: A Century of Great Civil War Quotations

  Edward L. Ayers

  This book is a collection of over 1,000 unforgettable quotations from America's defining experience, the Civil War. These quotes bring the passion and power of the people and events of the war to life. The voices are diverse, from Generals and soldiers, to enslaved and freed African Americans, to poets, journalists and writers. This collection contains quotes from those who participated, observers of the war, and perspectives of historians from the 20th century.

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  [Introduction to] The Oxford Book of the American South: Testimony, Memory, and Fiction

  Edward L. Ayers and Bradley C. Mittendorf

  Resonating with the testimony of slaves and slaveholders, the powerful and the powerless, women and men, black people and white, The Oxford Book of the American South combines the most telling fiction and nonfiction produced in the South from the late eighteenth century to the present. The first anthology to put short stories, novels, autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and journalism together, this collection is a rich and varied record of life below the Mason Dixon line. We see the antebellum period both from the perspective of those who experienced it first-hand, such as Thomas Jefferson and Harriet Jacobs, as well as from authors who imagined the era later, including William Styron and Sherley Anne Williams. Likewise, we see the Civil War through eyewitness accounts such as Sarah Morgan's, later writers' analyses such as W.E.B Du Bois's, and war-inspired fiction such as Margaret Mitchell's. Classic authors of the 1920s and 30s Southern Renaissance are followed by figures including Martin Luther King, Jr., George Garrett, and Peter Taylor, whose works capture the dramatic years of the Civil Rights movement. The struggles, defeats, and triumphs chronicled in The Oxford Book of the American South speak not just to the South, but to all of the American experience.

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  [Introduction to] All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions

  Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf

  Even as Americans keep moving "all over the map" in the late twentieth century, they cherish memories of the places they come from. But where do these places—these regions—come from? What makes them so real? In this groundbreaking book a distinguished group of historians explores the concept of region in America, traces changes the idea has undergone in our national experience, and examines its meaning for Americans today.

  Far from diminishing in importance, the authors conclude, regional differences continue to play a significant role in Americans' self-image. Regional identity, in fact, has always been fed by the very forces that many people think threaten its existence today: a central government, an aggressive economy, and connections with places beyond regional boundaries. Calling into question widely held notions about how Americans came to differ from one another and explaining why those differences continue to flourish, this iconoclastic study—by scholars with differing regional ties—will refresh and redirect the centuries-old discussion over Americans' conceptions of themselves.

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  [Introduction to] From Civilization to Segregation: Social Ideals and Social Control in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1934

  Carol Summers

  This study examines the social changes that took place in Southern Rhodesia after the arrival of the British South Africa Company in the 1890s. Summer’s work focuses on interactions among settlers, the officials of the British South America Company and the administration, missionaries, humanitarian groups in Britain, and the most vocal or noticeable groups of Africans. Through this period of military conquest and physical coercion, to the later attempts at segregationist social engineering, the ideals and justifications of Southern Rhodesians changed drastically. Native Policy, Native Education policies, and, eventually, segregationist Native Development policies changed and evolved as the white and black inhabitants of Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) struggled over the region’s social form and future.

  Summers’s work complements a handful of other recent works reexamining the social history of colonial Zimbabwe and demonstrating how knowledge, perception, and ideologies interacted with the economic and political dimensions of the region’s past.

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  [Introduction to] The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction

  Edward L. Ayers

  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.

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  [Introduction to] The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia

  Edward L. Ayers and John C. Willis

  The chapters in this volume explore diverse scenes of nineteenth-century Virginia: the big house and the slave quarters, small farms and battlefields, freed slaves in the country and freed slaves in the city, dark coal mines and brightly illuminated caverns, raucous political rallies and genteel meetings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Each essay offers a new perspective on a past which refuses to fit familiar ways of thinking about the nation and the South.

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  [Introduction to] Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South

  Edward L. Ayers

  Exploring the major elements of southern crime and punishment at a time that saw the formation of the fundamental patterns of class and race, Edward L. Ayers studies the inner workings of the police, prison, and judicial systems, and the nature of crime.