This landmark work provides a fundamental reinterpretation of the American South in the years since the Civil War, especially the decades after Reconstruction, from 1877 to 1920. Covering all aspects of Southern life--white and black, conservative and progressive, literary and political--it offers a new understanding of the forces that shaped the South of today.

The Crucible of Race, a major reinterpretation of black-white relations in the South, was widely acclaimed on publication and compared favorably to two of the seminal books on Southern history: Wilbur J. Cash's The Mind of the South and C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Representing 20 years of research and writing on the history of the South, The Crucible of Race explores the large topic of Southern race relations for a span of a century and a half. Oxford is pleased to make available an abridgement of this parent volume: A Rage for Order preserves all the theme lines that were advanced in the original volume and many of the individual stories. As in Crucible of Race, Williamson here confronts the awful irony that the war to free blacks from slavery also freed racism. He examines the shift in the power base of Southern white leadership after 1850 and recounts the terrible violence done to blacks in the name of self-protection. This condensation of one of the most important interpretations of Southern history is offered as a means by which a large audience can grasp the essentials of black-white relations--a problem that persists to this day and one with which we all must contend--North and South, black and white.

While many studies of race relations have focused on the black experience, Race against Time strives to unravel the emotional and cultural foundations of race in the white mind. Jack E. Davis combed primary documents in Natchez, Mississippi, and absorbed the town's oral history to understand white racial attitudes there over the past seven decades, a period rich in social change, strife, and reconciliation. What he found in this community that cultivates for profit a romantic view of the Old South challenges conventional assumptions about racial prejudice. Davis engagingly and effortlessly weaves between nineteenth and twentieth centuries, white observations and black, to describe patterns of social interaction in Natchez in the workplace, education, politics, religion, and daily life. It was not, he discovers, false notions of biological differences reinforced by class and economic conflict that lay at the heart of the town's racial divide but rather the perception of a black/white cultural divergence -- in values in education, work, and family. White culture was deemed superior, a presumption manifested through a hierarchy of old-family elite and other white citizens. Since 1930, Natchez has developed a major tourist industry, downsized sharecropping, expanded its manufacturing sector, and participated in the struggles for civil rights, school desegregation, and black political empowerment. Yet the collective white perception of a mythic past has continued, reinforced through the sum of Natchez's public history -- social memory, school textbooks, breathtaking antebellum mansions, and world-famous Pilgrimage. In Race against Time, Davis sensitively lays bare the need for shared control of the town's history and the acknowledgment of intercultural dependence to effect true racial equality. Building upon the 1941 classic Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class, Davis brings tremendous passion and insight to the demanding issue of race as he fathoms the contours of Natchez's distinctive racial dynamics in recent decades.

White supremacy shaped all aspects of post-Civil War southern life, yet its power was never complete or total. The form of segregation and subjection nicknamed Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself over time even as white southern politicians struggled to extend its grip. Here, some of the most innovative scholars of southern history question Jim Crow's sway, evolution, and methods over the course of a century. These essays bring to life the southern men and women--some heroic and decent, others mean and sinister, most a mixture of both--who supported and challenged Jim Crow, showing that white supremacy always had to prove its power. Jim Crow was always in motion, always adjusting to meet resistance and defiance by both African Americans and whites. Sometimes white supremacists responded with increased ferocity, sometimes with more subtle political and legal ploys. Jumpin' Jim Crow presents a clear picture of this complex negotiation. For example, even as some black and white women launched the strongest attacks on the system, other white women nurtured myths glorifying white supremacy. Even as elite whites blamed racial violence on poor whites, they used Jim Crow to dominate poor whites as well as blacks. Most important, the book portrays change over time, suggesting that Strom Thurmond is not a simple reincarnation of Ben Tillman and that Rosa Parks was not the first black woman to say no to Jim Crow. From a study of the segregation of household consumption to a fresh look at critical elections, from an examination of an unlikely antilynching campaign to an analysis of how miscegenation laws tried to sexualize black political power, these essays about specific southern times and places exemplify the latest trends in historical research. Its rich, accessible content makes Jumpin' Jim Crow an ideal undergraduate reader on American history, while its methodological innovations will be emulated by scholars of political history generally. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Edward L. Ayers, Elsa Barkley Brown, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Laura F. Edwards, Kari Frederickson, David F. Godshalk, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Stephen Kantrowitz, Nancy MacLean, Nell Irwin Painter, and Timothy B. Tyson.

This book examines the historiography of the African American freedom struggle from the 1890s to the present. It considers how, and why, the study of African American history developed from being a marginalized subject in American universities and colleges at the start of the twentieth century to become one of the most extensively researched fields in American history today. There is analysis of the changing scholarly interpretations of African American leaders from Booker T. Washington through to Barack Obama. The impact and significance of the leading civil rights organizations are assessed, as well as the white segregationists who opposed them and the civil rights policies of presidential administrations from Woodrow Wilson to Donald Trump. The civil rights struggle is also discussed in the context of wider, political, social and economic changes in the United States and developments in popular culture.

New People is an insightful historical analysis of the miscegenation of American whites and blacks from colonial times to the present, of the “new people” produced by these interracial relationships, and of the myriad ways in which miscegenation has affected our national culture. Because the majority of American blacks are in fact of mixed ancestry, and because mulattoes and pure blacks ultimately combined their cultural heritages, what begins in the colonial period as mulatto history and culture ends in the twentieth century as black history and culture. Thus, understanding the history of the mulatto becomes one way of understanding something of the experience of the African American. Williamson traces the fragile lines of color and caste that have separated mulattoes, blacks, and whites throughout history and speculates on the effect that the increasing ambiguity of those lines will have on the future of American society.