Struggle For The Soul Of The Postwar South

Download or read book Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South written by Ken Fones-Wolf and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

Download or read book How the South Won the Civil War written by Heather Cox Richardson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.

Download or read book Framing the South written by Allison Graham and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-10-20 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What patterns emerge in media coverage and character depiction of Southern men and women, blacks and whites, in the years between 1954 and 1976? Allison Graham examines the ways in which the media, particularly television and film, presented Southerners during the civil rights revolution.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Christian Fundamentalism written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-26 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian fundamentalism is a significant global movement which originally took its name from The Fundamentals, a series of booklets defending classic evangelical doctrines, published in the 1910s. The Oxford Handbook of Christian Fundamentalism traces the roots of fundamentalism from the late nineteenth century and explores the development of the movement up to the present day. Since its inception, fundamentalism has proved a highly contested category. By some the label is recognised as a badge of honour, by others a term of abuse. This volume does not offer a simple definition of fundamentalism. Rather, it acknowledges its many interpretative and definitional complexities, and allows multiple identities to jostle together under the 'fundamentalist' label. The boundaries are porous between fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism, so the Handbook includes analysis of some conservative expressions of Christianity which show fundamentalist characteristics, even in groups which refuse to define themselves as 'fundamentalist'. The relationship of fundamentalism to Pentecostalism and charismatic renewal is also explored in detail. Research-led chapters cover significant historical developments, key doctrines such as biblical inerrancy, creationism and separatism, and an extensive range of moral and cultural issues to which the contribution of fundamentalism has been significant, including popular music, alcohol, sport, and family life. Contributors also chart the evolution of the movement globally—far beyond its North Atlantic origins. Recognising the prominence of fundamentalism beyond the Church, the Handbook explores its contribution to public debates concerning political influence, education, human genetics, civil rights, business, global warning, sexuality, Israel and the Middle East, the shaping of contemporary culture, and much else. Christian fundamentalism, this Handbook ultimately shows, is one of the most significant movements operating in today's world.

Download or read book Religion of White Rage written by Finley Stephen C. Finley and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critically analyses the historical, cultural and political dimensions of white religious rage in America, past and present This book sheds light on the phenomenon of white rage, and maps out the uneasy relationship between white anxiety, religious fervour, American identity and perceived black racial progress. Contributors to the volume examine the sociological construct of the "e;white labourer"e;, whose concerns and beliefs can be understood as religious in foundation, and uncover that white religious fervor correlates to notions of perceived white loss and perceived black progress. In discussions ranging from the Constitution to the Charlottesville riots to the evangelical community's uncritical support for Trump, the authors of this collection argue that it is not economics but religion and race that stand as the primary motivating factors for the rise of white rage and white supremacist sentiment in the United States.

Download or read book Death to Fascism written by John P. Enyeart and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born to Slovenian peasants, Louis Adamic commanded crowds, met with FDR and Truman, and built a prolific career as an author and journalist. Behind the scenes, he played a leading role in a coalition of black intellectuals and writers, working class militants, ethnic activists, and others that worked for a multiethnic America and against fascism. John Enyeart restores Adamic's life to the narrative of American history. Dogged and energetic, Adamic championed causes that ranged from ethnic and racial equality to worker's rights to anticolonialism. Adamic defied the consensus that equated being American with Anglo-Protestant culture. Instead, he insisted newcomers and their ideas kept the American identity in a state of dynamism that pushed it from strength to strength. In time, Adamic's views put him at odds with an establishment dedicated to cold war aggression and white supremacy. He increasingly fought smear campaigns and the distortion of his views--both of which continued after his probable murder in 1951.

Download or read book The Routledge History of Twentieth-Century United States written by Jerald Podair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-02 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States is a comprehensive introduction to the most important trends and developments in the study of modern United States history. Driven by interdisciplinary scholarship, the thirty-four original chapters underscore the vast range of identities, perspectives and tensions that contributed to the growth and contested meanings of the United States in the twentieth century. The chronological and topical breadth of the collection highlights critical political and economic developments of the century while also drawing attention to relatively recent areas of research, including borderlands, technology and disability studies. Dynamic and flexible in its possible applications, The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States offers an exciting new resource for the study of modern American history.