After conquering Atlanta in the summer of 1864 and occupying it for two months, Union forces laid waste to the city in November. William T. Sherman's invasion was a pivotal moment in the history of the South and Atlanta's rebuilding over the following fifty years came to represent the contested meaning of the Civil War itself. The war's aftermath brought contentious transition from Old South to New for whites and African Americans alike. Historian William Link argues that this struggle defined the broader meaning of the Civil War in the modern South, with no place embodying the region's past and future more clearly than Atlanta. Link frames the city as both exceptional--because of the incredible impact of the war there and the city's phoenix-like postwar rise--and as a model for other southern cities. He shows how, in spite of the violent reimposition of white supremacy, freedpeople in Atlanta built a cultural, economic, and political center that helped to define black America.

Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War's Aftermath

Providing in-depth information about Georgia's unique experience during the interval between 1877 and 1918, this text supplements the Georgia Social Studies Performance Standards. Readers will learn about Jim Crow laws, the International Cotton Exposition, and the factors leading up to the First World War. The book illuminates importance of noteworthy individuals such as W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Alonzo Herndon. Primary source images expand on the information, and eye-catching photographs draw readers' interest.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, a turbulent period fraught with violence, struggle, and uncertainty, a forgotten few African Americans banded together as men to assert their rights as citizens. Following emancipation, the nation’s newest citizens established churches, entered the political arena, created educational and business opportunities, and even formed labor organizations, but it was through state militia service, with the prestige and heightened status conveyed by their affiliation, that they displayed their loyalty, discipline, and more importantly, their manliness within the public sphere. In African American State Volunteers in the New South, John Patrick Blair offers a comparative examination of the experiences and activities of African American men as members in the state volunteer military organizations of Georgia, Texas, and Virginia, including the complicated relationships between state government and military officials—many of them former Confederate officers—and the leaders of the Black militia volunteers. This important new study expands understanding of racial accommodation, however minor, toward the African American military, confirmed not only in the actions of state government and military officials to arm, equip, and train these Black troops, but also in the acceptance of clearly visible and authorized military activities by these very same volunteers. In doing so, it adds significant layers to our knowledge of racial politics as they developed during Reconstruction, and prompts us to consider a broader understanding of the history of the South into the twentieth century.

Since Reconstruction, African Americans have served as key protagonists in the rich and expansive narrative of American social protest. Their collective efforts challenged and redefined the meaning of freedom as a social contract in America. During the first half of the 20th century, a progressive group of black business, civic, and religious leaders from Atlanta, Georgia, challenged the status quo by employing a method of incremental gradualism to improve the social and political conditions existent within the city. By the mid-20th century, a younger generation of activists emerged, seeking a more direct and radical approach towards exercising their rights as full citizens. A culmination of the death of Emmett Till and the Brown decision fostered this paradigm shift by bringing attention to the safety and educational concerns specific to African American youth. Deploying direct-action tactics and invoking the language of civil and human rights, the energy and zest of this generation of activists pushed the modern civil rights movement into a new chapter where young men and women became the voice of social unrest.

In Gwinnett County’s two hundred years, the area has been western, southern, rural, suburban, and now increasingly urban. Its stories include the displacement of Native peoples, white settlement, legal battles over Indian Removal, slavery and cotton, the Civil War and the Lost Cause, New South railroad and town development, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, business development and finance in a national economy, a Populist uprising and Black outmigration, the entrance of women into the political arena, the evolution of cotton culture, the development of modern infrastructure, and the transformation from rural to suburban to a multicultural urbanizing place. Gwinnett, as its chamber of commerce likes to say, has it all. However, Gwinnett has yet to be the focus of a major historical exploration—until now. Through a compilation of essays written by professional historians with expertise in a diverse array of eras and fields, Michael Gagnon and Matthew Hild’s collection finally tells these stories in a systematic way—avoiding the pitfalls of nonprofessional local histories that tend to ignore issues of race, class, or gender. While not claiming to be comprehensive, this book provides general readers and scholars alike with a glimpse at Gwinnett through the ages.

Winner of the American Historical Association’s 2022 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize. White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. Journalism and Jim Crow centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. The contributors explore the leading role of the white press in constructing an anti-democratic society by promoting and supporting not only lynching and convict labor but also coordinated campaigns of violence and fraud that disenfranchised Black voters. They also examine the Black press’s parallel fight for a multiracial democracy of equality, justice, and opportunity for all—a losing battle with tragic consequences for the American experiment. Original and revelatory, Journalism and Jim Crow opens up new ways of thinking about the complicated relationship between journalism and power in American democracy. Contributors: Sid Bedingfield, Bryan Bowman, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Kathy Roberts Forde, Robert Greene II, Kristin L. Gustafson, D'Weston Haywood, Blair LM Kelley, and Razvan Sibii