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Exploration of African American contributions to the state of Florida during the era of Reconstruction

Despite their shortcomings, “radical” politicians, including African Americans, made worthy contributions to the state of Florida during the era of Reconstruction. Joe Richardson disputes many of the misconceptions about the state’s debt and corruption by exploring how some African American politicians were quite capable and learned their duties quickly. Even more remarkable was the rapidity with which the unlettered ex-slaves absorbed education and adjusted to their status as free men. African Americans in the Reconstruction of Florida delves into the problems encountered by the freed men and traces their successes and failures during the first decade after emancipation.

Crucial changes occurred during the years following the Civil War as blacks manifested their desire to live as independently as possible and to reject every social relation reminiscent of slavery. This classic study of the history of post-slave societies helped to initiate historiographic trends that remain central to the study of emancipation.

On December 4, 1865, members of the 39th United States Congress walked into the Capitol Building to begin their first session after the end of the Civil War. They understood their responsibility to put the nation back on the path established by the American Founding Fathers. The moment when the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress remade the nation and renewed the law is in a class of rare events. The Civil War should be seen in this light.

In From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, Forrest A. Nabors shows that the ultimate goal of the Republican Party, the war, and Reconstruction was the same. This goal was to preserve and advance republicanism as the American founders understood it, against its natural, existential enemy: oligarchy. The principle of natural equality justified American republicanism and required abolition and equal citizenship. Likewise, slavery and discrimination on the basis of color stand on the competing moral foundation of oligarchy, the principle of natural inequality, which requires ranks.

The effect of slavery and the division of the nation into two “opposite systems of civilization” are causally linked. Charles Devens, a lawyer who served as a general in the Union Army, and his contemporaries understood that slavery’s existence transformed the character of political society.

One of those dramatic effects was the increased power of slaveowners over those who did not have slaves. When the slave state constitutions enumerated slaves in apportioning representation using the federal three-fifths ratio or by other formulae, intra-state sections where slaves were concentrated would receive a substantial grant of political power for slave ownership. In contrast, low slave-owning sections of the state would lose political representation and political influence over the state. This contributed to the non-slaveholders’ loss of political liberty in the slave states and provided a direct means by which the slaveholders acquired and maintained their rule over non-slaveholders.

This book presents a shared analysis of the slave South, synthesized from the writings and speeches of the Republicans who served in the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth or Fortieth Congress from 1863-1869. The account draws from their writings and speeches dated before, during, and after their service in Congress. Nabors shows how the Republican majority, charged with the responsibility of reconstructing the South, understood the South.

Republicans in Congress were generally united around the fundamental problem and goal of Reconstruction. They regarded their work in the same way as they regarded the work of the American founders. Both they and the founders were engaged in regime change, from monarchy in the one case, and from oligarchy in the other, to republicanism. The insurrectionary states’ governments had to be reconstructed at their foundations, from oligarchic to republican. The sharp differences within Congress pertained to how to achieve that higher goal.

Japan's Economy in War and Reconstruction was first published in 1949. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Dr. Cohen's substantial monograph is a carefully documented account of Japan's economic development from 1937 to 1949. It describes with much statistical evidence a remarkable experiment in planned industrial expansion prior to 1941, then continues with a survey of the war years, showing both the successes and failures of the planning, controlling, financing, and developing of Japan's war industries.

The last part of the book deals with the post-war problems of Japan from the war's end to the latter part of 1948—three years of occupation by the Allied Powers. Dr. Cohen discusses the three key economic factors: the basic reforms, the rapidly mounting inflation, and the slowly increasing, but still low level of production.

Dr. Cohen's first chapter is devoted to the careful planning of the years before the war. The next chapters discuss Japan's efforts to cope with the problems of munitions, food supply, and labor as the Allied war effort gradually wore her down. There are detailed studies of separate industries, shipping, and agriculture, and a discussion of the parts played respectively by air, sea, and land operations in the destruction of Japan's ability to wage successful war.

One of the main theses of these chapters is that the increasingly enveloping blockade of Japan shut off necessary industrial raw materials, and so brought Japanese war production to a virtual standstill before the main weight of the strategic air attack was delivered, and so made it impossible for Japan to continue the war.

The author's grim picture of inter-service quarrels and overlapping and inconsistent controls demonstrates that the Japanese army, navy, and civil service, in spite of their reputation for exact and strict organization, in practice failed to make good use of their unlimited powers.

Co-Winner of the 2003 American Sociological Association's Asia/Asian American book award.

Based on ethnographic research in three communities (Ezhava Hindu, Mappila Muslim, and Syrian Christian) in Kerala, India, which sent large numbers of workers to the Middle East for temporary jobs, Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity explores the factors responsible for the striking differences in the groups’ patterns of migration and migration-induced social change. Most broadly, Prema Kurien seeks to understand what ethnicity is and how it affects people’s activities and decisions. She argues that, in each case, a community-specific nexus of religion, gender, and status shaped migration, and was, in turn, transformed by it.

The religious background of the three groups determined their social location within colonial and postcolonial Kerala. This social location in turn affected their occupational profiles, family structures, and social networks, as well as their conceptions of gender and honor, and thus was fundamental in shaping migration patterns. The rapid enrichment brought about by international migration resulted in a reinterpretation of religious identity and practice which was manifested by changes in patterns of gendered behavior and status in each of the three communities. What makes this book unique is its focus on the sociocultural patterns of short-term international migration and its comparative ethnographic approach.

Kinship systems are the glue that holds social groups together. This volume presents a novel approach to understanding the genesis of these systems and how and why they change. The editors bring together experts from the disciplines of anthropology and linguistics to explore kinship in societies around the world and to reconstruct kinship in ancient times. Kinship Systems presents evidence of renewed activity and advances in this field in recent years which will contribute to the current interdisciplinary focus on the evolution of society. While all continents are touched on in this book, there is special emphasis on Australian indigenous societies, which have been a source of fascination in kinship studies.

One key argument in the book is that linguistic evidence for reconstruction of ancient terminologies can provide strong independent evidence to complement anthropologists’ notions of structural kinship transformations and ground them in actual historical and  geographical contexts. There are principles that we all share, no matter what kind of society we live in, and these provide a common “language” for anthropology and linguistics. With this language we can accurately compare how family relations are organized in different societies, as well as how we talk about such relations. Because this concept has often been denied by the trajectories in anthropology over the last few decades, Kinship Systems represents a reassertion of, and advances on, classical kinship theory and methods. Innovations and interdisciplinary methods are described by the originators of the new approaches and other leading regional experts.

The story of life's splendid drama has captivated generations of the general public, just as it has intrigued biologists, especially those who began to try to solve evolutionary puzzles in the years immediately after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Yet histories of the Darwinian revolution have paid far more attention to theoretical debates and have largely ignored the researchers who struggled to comprehend the deeper evolutionary significance of fossil bones and the structures of living animals. Peter J. Bowler recovers some of this lost history in Life's Splendid Drama, the definitive account of evolutionary morphology and its relationships with paleontology and bio-geography.

"Intriguing and insightful."—William Kimler, American Scientist

"[A] volume of impressive scholarship and extensive references."—Library Journal

"One of Bowler's best."—Kevin Padian, Nature

"[Bowler's] comprehensive review of the various debates and ideas in taxonomy, morphology, and vertebrate evolution . . . deserves the attention of biologists and other scholars interested in the history of ideas."—Choice

"The persistence of pre-Darwinian modes of thought in contemporary biology underlines the importance of Bowler's book. Its value is not only in the history it provides, but also in the way it illumines the present."—Peter J. Causton, Boston Book Review

Although Abraham Lincoln dominates the literature on the American Civil War, he remains less commonly associated with reconstruction. Previous scholarly works touch on Lincoln and reconstruction, but they tend either to speculate on what Lincoln might have done after the war had he not been assassinated or to approach his reconstruction plans merely as a means of winning the war. In this thought-provoking study, John C. Rodrigue offers a succinct but significant survey of Lincoln’s wartime reconstruction initiatives while providing a fresh interpretation of the president’s plans for postwar America. 

Revealing that Lincoln concerned himself with reconstruction from the earliest days of his presidency, Rodrigue details how Lincoln’s initiatives unfolded, especially in the southern states where they were attempted. He explores Lincoln’s approach to various issues relevant to reconstruction, including slavery, race, citizenship, and democracy; his dealings with Congressional Republicans, especially the Radicals; his support for and eventual abandonment of colonization; his dealings with the border states; his handling of the calls for negotiations with the Confederacy as a way of reconstructing the Union; and his move toward emancipation and its implications for his approach to reconstruction.

As the Civil War progressed, Rodrigue shows, Lincoln’s definition of reconstruction transformed from the mere restoration of the seceded states to a more fundamental social, economic, and political reordering of southern society and of the Union itself. Based on Lincoln’s own words and writings as well as an extensive array of secondary literature, Rodrigue traces the evolution of Lincoln’s thinking on reconstruction, providing new insight into a downplayed aspect of his presidency.

Before the 1930s, landscapes of the American Southwest represented the migrant’s dream of a stable and bountiful homeland. Around the time of the Great Depression, however, the Southwest suddenly became integrated into a much larger economic and cultural system. Audrey Goodman examines how—since that time—these southwestern landscapes have come to reveal the resulting fragmentation of identity and community.

Through analyzing a variety of texts and images, Goodman illuminates the ways that modern forces such as militarization, environmental degradation, internal migration, and an increased border patrol presence have shattered the perception of a secure homeland in the Southwest. The deceptive natural beauty of the Southwest deserts shields a dark history of trauma and decimation that has remained as a shadow on the region’s psyche. The first to really synthesize such wide-ranging material about the effects of the atomic age in the Southwest, Goodman realizes the value of combined visual and verbal art and uses it to put forth her own original ideas about reconstructing a new sense of homeland.

Lost Homelands reminds us of the adversity and dislocation suffered by people of the Southwest by looking at the ways that artists, photographers, filmmakers, and writers have grappled with these problems for decades. In assessing the ruination of the region, however, Goodman argues that those same artists and writers have begun to reassemble a new sense of homeland from these fragments.

Armed with only early boyhood memories, Lawrence P. Jackson begins his quest by setting out from his home in Baltimore for Pittsylvania County, Virginia, to try to find his late grandfather’s old home by the railroad tracks in Blairs. My Father’s Name tells the tale of the ensuing journey, at once a detective story and a moving historical memoir, uncovering the mixture of anguish and fulfillment that accompanies a venture into the ancestral past, specifically one tied to the history of slavery.

After asking around in Pittsylvania County and carefully putting the pieces together, Jackson finds himself in the house of distant relations. In the pages that follow, he becomes increasingly absorbed by the search for his ancestors and increasingly aware of how few generations an African American needs to map back in order to arrive at slavery, “a door of no return.” Ultimately, Jackson’s dogged research in libraries, census records, and courthouse registries enables him to trace his family to his grandfather’s grandfather, a man who was born or sold into slavery but who, when Federal troops abandoned the South in 1877, was able to buy forty acres of land. In this intimate study of a black Virginia family and neighborhood, Jackson vividly reconstructs moments in the lives of his father’s grandfather, Edward Jackson, and great-grandfather, Granville Hundley, and gives life to revealing narratives of Pittsylvania County, recalling both the horror of slavery and the later struggles of postbellum freedom.
My Father’s Name is a family story full of twists and turns—and one of haunting familiarity to many Americans, who may question whether the promises of emancipation have ever truly been fulfilled. It is also a resolute look at the duties that come with reclaiming and honoring Americans who survived slavery and a thoughtful meditation on its painful and enduring history.

The story of Old Abe, the bald eagle that became the mascot of the Eighth Regiment of Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. It is also the story of the men among whom Old Abe lived: the farmers, loggers, clerks, and immigrants who flocked to the colors in 1861.

Reissued in 2012 with a new cover.

In Only One Place of Redress David E. Bernstein offers a bold reinterpretation of American legal history: he argues that American labor and occupational laws, enacted by state and federal governments after the Civil War and into the twentieth century, benefited dominant groups in society to the detriment of those who lacked political power. Both intentionally and incidentally, claims Bernstein, these laws restricted in particular the job mobility and economic opportunity of blacks.

A pioneer in applying the insights of public choice theory to legal history, Bernstein contends that the much-maligned jurisprudence of the Lochner era—with its emphasis on freedom of contract and private market ordering—actually discouraged discrimination and assisted groups with little political clout. To support this thesis he examines the motivation behind and practical impact of laws restricting interstate labor recruitment, occupational licensing laws, railroad labor laws, minimum wage statutes, the Davis-Bacon Act, and New Deal collective bargaining. He concludes that the ultimate failure of Lochnerism—and the triumph of the regulatory state—not only strengthened racially exclusive labor unions but contributed to a massive loss of employment opportunities for African Americans, the effects of which continue to this day.

Scholars and students interested in race relations, labor law, and legal or constitutional history will be fascinated by Bernstein’s daring—and controversial—argument.

Sigmund Koch (1917-1996) was one of the twentieth century's most penetrating and wide-ranging critics of the scientistic ambitions of psychology. Writing in a style sometimes scathing, sometimes witty, always lucid, he decried any psychology that attempted to eradicate the human dimension from the study, scientific and otherwise, of human experience and action. A philosopher and humanist by nature, Koch also sought to change the multifaceted field of psychology by moving it closer to the humanities and arts.

The broad scope of essays in Psychology in Human Context—which began as the basis for the eagerly anticipated postscript to Koch's seminal Psychology: A Study of a Science—reveals his writings to be as fresh and relevant today as ever. Carefully edited by two of Koch's close associates, this collection places psychological and philosophical issues in the context of twentieth-century thought and provides intellectual and moral signposts for future travelers in what Koch regarded as the irreducibly rich and human realm of the psychological studies.

Sigmund Koch was University Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Boston University, the editor of the landmark six-volume series Psychology: A Study of a Science (1959-1963) and coeditor of A Century of Psychology as Science. He served as the president of three divisions of the American Psychological Association and was director of the Ford Foundation program in the Humanities and the Arts (1964-1967).

This study of education for freedmen following Emancipation is the definitive treatment of the subject. Employing a wide range of sources, Robert C. Morris examines the organizations that staffed and managed black schools in the South, with particular attention paid to the activities of the Freedman’s Bureau. He looks as well at those who came to teach, a diverse group—white, black, Northern, Southern—and at the curricula and textbooks they used. While giving special emphasis to the Freedmen’s Bureau school program, Morris places the freedmen’s educational movement fully in its nineteenth-century context, relating it both to the antislavery crusade that preceded it and to the conservative era of race relations that followed.

Sandy was the costliest hurricane in U.S. history after Katrina, but the waters had barely receded from the Jersey coast when massive efforts began to “Restore the Shore.”  Why do people build in areas open to repeated natural disasters?  And why do they return to these areas in the wake of major devastation?  Drawing on a variety of insights from environmental sociology, Superstorm Sandy answers these questions as it looks at both the unique character of the Jersey Shore and the more universal ways that humans relate to their environment. 
 
Diane C. Bates offers a wide-ranging look at the Jersey Shore both before and after Sandy, examining the many factors—such as cultural attachment, tourism revenues, and governmental regulation—that combined to create a highly vulnerable coastal region. She explains why the Shore is so important to New Jerseyans, acting as a key cultural touchstone in a state that lacks a central city or even a sports team to build a shared identity among the state’s residents. She analyzes post-Sandy narratives about the Jersey Shore that trumpeted the dominance of human ingenuity over nature (such as the state’s “Stronger than the Storm” advertising campaign) or proclaimed a therapeutic community (“Jersey Strong”)—narratives rooted in emotion and iconography, waylaying any thought of the near-certainty of future storms. The book also examines local business owners, politicians, real estate developers, and residents who have vested interests in the region, explaining why the Shore was developed intensively prior to Sandy, and why restoration became an imperative in the post-storm period.
 
Engagingly written and insightful, Superstorm Sandy highlights the elements that compounded the disaster on the Shore, providing a framework for understanding such catastrophes and preventing them in the future. 

This groundbreaking study, first published in 1994, draws on a rich variety of primary sources to describe Arkansas society before, during, and after the Civil War. While the Civil War devastated the state, this book shows how those who were powerful before the war reclaimed their dominance during Reconstruction. Most importantly, the white elite's postwar commitment to a cotton economy led them to set up a sharecropping system very much like slavery, in which workers had little control over their own labor. In arguing for both change and continuity, Moneyhon reconciles contemporary accounts of the war's effects while addressing ongoing debates within the historical literature.

A collection of all of Dewey’s writings for 1920 with the excep­tion of Letters from China and Japan. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.

The nineteen items collected here, including his major work, Reconstruction in Philosophy, evolved in the main from Dewey’s travel, touring, lecturing, and teaching in Japan and China. Ralph Ross notes in his Introduction to this volume that Recon­struction in Philosophy is “a radical book . . . a pugnacious book by a gentle man.” It is in this book that Dewey summarizes his version of pragmatism, then called Instrumentalism. For Dew­ey, the pragmatist, it was people acting on the strength of in­telligence modeled on science who could find true ideas, ones “we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify.” Optimism pervades Reconstruction of Philosophy; in keeping with Dewey’s world of open possibilities, the book recognizes that the obser­vation and thought of human striving can make the difference between despair and affirmation of life.

The seven essays on Chinese politics and social tradition that Dewey sent back from the Orient exhibit both the liveliness and the sensitive power of an insightful mind. Set against a backdrop of Japanese hegemony in China, the last days of Manchu imperi­alism, Europe’s carving of China into concessions, and China’s subsequent refusal to accept the terms of the Treaty of Ver­sailles, the essays were startlingly relevant in this time of Eastern turbulence and change.

At the National University of Peking, Dewey delivered a se­ries of lectures on “Three Contemporary Philosophers: William James, Henri Bergson, and Bertrand Russell.” The James and Bergson lectures are published for the first time in this volume. Dewey chose these philosophers, according to Ralph Ross, be­cause he was trying to show “his oriental audience what he believed and hoped about man and society and was talking about those fellow philosophers who shared the same beliefs and hopes.”

"A meticulous, well-tuned examination of what Janowitz says is the decline of civic thought in America, and what might be done to restore it. . . . The patriotism Janowitz proposes to reconstruct is not the sort of narrow nationalism your political science professor may have warned you about—patriotism as 'the last refuge of a scoundrel.' It is instead a patriotism that intelligently appreciates life in a (however imperfect) democratic land."—Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor

"In The Reconstruction of Patriotism, Morris Janowitz . . . places a national-service program on the national agenda. . . . Like William James, Janowitz envisions government enrolling young people to work for a year or two at subsistence pay, doing jobs that benefit society—working with, say, 'conservation, health, or old-age problems.' He believes that we need a service program because since the end of the Second World War our citizens (and, indeed, citizens of almost all the advanced industrial nations) have become more keenly aware of their rights than of their obligations, and generations are growing up with little or no understanding that they are members of a national community and have responsibilities to it—that they must give as well as take. . . . Because it reopens discussion of our wider obligations and how to fulfill them, Mr. Janowitz's thoughtful book is in itself a national service."—Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker


"Morris Janowitz examines an issue that seldom is subject to social and political analysis—patriotism. His thesis is clear: The long-term trend in politics has been to enhance citizen rights without effective articulation of citizen obligations. A meaningful balance between the two, he contends, must be restored. . . . The strength of this study lies in Janowitz's persuasive argument that the durability and vitality of democratic institutions require that a sense of community, or shared values, be preserved. Without civiz consciousness, he rightly observes, social and political fragmentation ensues. . . . A lucid and impressively researched polemic."—W. Wesley McDonald, American Political Science Review


"Janowitz addresses a seminal issue: how to restore the sense of shared civic responsibility that has fallen victim in recent years to our growing preoccupation with individual rights and the rise of special-interest groups. . . . Central to his prescription is the revival of the concept of the citizen soldier, whose importance since pre-Revolutionary War days Janoqitz discusses at length. He concludes, 'There can be no reconstruction of patriotism without a system of national service.' . . . An important book. I highly recommend it."—Washington Monthly

Published to mark the Civil War sesquicentennial, The Yellowhammer War collects new essays on Alabama’s role in, and experience of, the bloody national conflict and its aftermath.

During the first winter of the war, Confederate soldiers derided the men of an Alabama Confederate unit for their yellow-trimmed uniforms that allegedly resembled the plumage of the yellow-shafted flicker or “yellowhammer” (now the Northern Flicker, Colaptes auratus, and the state bird of Alabama). The soldiers’ nickname, “Yellowhammers,” came from this epithet. After the war, Alabama veterans proudly wore yellowhammer feathers in their hats or lapels when attending reunions. Celebrations throughout the state have often expanded on that pageantry and glorified the figures, events, and battles of the Civil War with sometimes dubious attention to historical fact and little awareness of those who supported, resisted, or tolerated the war off the battlefield.

Many books about Alabama’s role in the Civil War have focused serious attention on the military and political history of the war. The Yellowhammer War likewise examines the military and political history of Alabama’s Civil War contributions, but it also covers areas of study usually neglected by centennial scholars, such as race, women, the home front, and Reconstruction. From Patricia A. Hoskins’s look at Jews in Alabama during the Civil War and Jennifer Ann Newman Treviño’s examination of white women’s attitudes during secession to Harriet E. Amos Doss’s study of the reaction of Alabamians to Lincoln’s Assassination and Jason J. Battles’s essay on the Freedman’s Bureau, readers are treated to a broader canvas of topics on the Civil War and the state.

CONTRIBUTORS
Jason J. Battles / Lonnie A. Burnett / Harriet E. Amos Doss / Bertis English / Michael W. Fitzgerald / Jennifer Lynn Gross / Patricia A. Hoskins / Kenneth W. Noe / Victoria E. Ott  / Terry L. Seip / Ben H. Severance / Kristopher A. Teters / Jennifer Ann Newman Treviño / Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins / Brian Steel Wills

Published in Cooperation with the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War and Reconstruction invites reflection on the broad meaning of American democracy, including the ideals of freedom, equality, racial justice, and self-determination. In We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice, John David Smith brings together a wealth of primary texts—editorials, letters, newspaper articles, and personal testimonies—to illuminate the experience of emancipation for the millions of African Americans enmeshed in the transition from chattel slavery to freedom from 1865 to 1877.

The years following Appomattox offered the freed people numerous opportunities and challenges. Ex-slaves reconnected with relatives dispersed by the domestic slave trade and the vicissitudes of civil war. They sought their own farms and homesteads, education for their children, and legal protection from whites hostile to their new status. They negotiated labor contracts, established local communities, and, following the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, entered local, state, and national politics.

Though aided by Freedmen's Bureau agents and sympathetic whites, former slaves nevertheless faced daunting odds. Ku Klux Klansmen and others terrorized blacks who asserted themselves, many northerners lost interest in their plight, and federal officials gradually left them to their own resources. As a result, former Confederates regained control of the southern state governments following the 1876 presidential election.

We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice is a substantially revised and expanded edition of a book originally published under the title Black Voices from Reconstruction, 1865–1877.