Confederate Cities
The Urban South During the Civil War Era
1st Edition
Published on 22. December 2022
336 pages
978-0-226-30034-4 (ISBN)
Description
When we talk about the Civil War, we often describe it in terms of battles that took place in small towns or in the countryside: Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and, most tellingly, the Battle of the Wilderness. One reason this picture has persisted is that few urban historians have studied the war, even though cities hosted, enabled, and shaped Southern society as much as they did in the North.
Confederate Cities, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, shifts the focus from the agrarian economy that undergirded the South to the cities that served as its political and administrative hubs. The contributors use the lens of the city to examine now-familiar Civil War-era themes, including the scope of the war, secession, gender, emancipation, and war's destruction. This more integrative approach dramatically revises our understanding of slavery's relationship to capitalist economics and cultural modernity. By enabling a more holistic reading of the South, the book speaks to contemporary Civil War scholars and students alike-not least in providing fresh perspectives on a well-studied war.
Confederate Cities, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, shifts the focus from the agrarian economy that undergirded the South to the cities that served as its political and administrative hubs. The contributors use the lens of the city to examine now-familiar Civil War-era themes, including the scope of the war, secession, gender, emancipation, and war's destruction. This more integrative approach dramatically revises our understanding of slavery's relationship to capitalist economics and cultural modernity. By enabling a more holistic reading of the South, the book speaks to contemporary Civil War scholars and students alike-not least in providing fresh perspectives on a well-studied war.
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
12/2015
University of Chicago Press
€99.20
Article not available at the moment
Persons
Andrew L. Slap is professor of history at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of
The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era and editor of
Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War's Aftermath.
Frank Towers is associate professor of history at the University of Calgary. He is the author of
The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War and coeditor of
The Old South's Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword (David Goldfield)
- Introduction: Historians and the Urban South's Civil War (Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers)
- Part One: The Big Picture
- 1. Regionalism and Urbanism as Problems in Confederate Urban History (J. Matthew Gallman)
- 2. Urban Processes in the Confederacy's Development, Experience, and Consequences (David Moltke-Hansen)
- Part Two: Secession
- 3. To Be the "New York of the South": Urban Boosterism and the Secession Movement (Frank Towers)
- 4. Gender and Household Metaphors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Nation-Building Cities (T. Lloyd Benson)
- Part Three: Gender
- 5. Stephen Spalding's Fourth of July in New Orleans (Michael Pierson)
- 6. "More like Amazons than starving people": Women's Urban Riots in Georgia in 1863 (Keith S. Bohannon)
- Part Four: Emancipation
- 7. African American Veterans, the Memphis Region, and the Urbanization of the Postwar South (Andrew L. Slap)
- 8. Black Political Mobilization and the Spatial Transformation of Natchez (Justin Behrend)
- 9. African Americans' Struggle for Education, Citizenship, and Freedom, in Mobile, Alabama, 1865-1868 (Hilary N. Green)
- Part Five: A New Urban South
- 10. Invasion, Destruction, and the Remaking of Civil War Atlanta (William A. Link)
- 11. Freeing the Lavish Hand of Nature: Environment and Economy in Nineteenth-Century Hampton Roads (John Majewski)
- Conclusion: Cities and the History of the Civil War South (Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers)
- Contributors
- Index
