[PDF] Southern Progressivism eBook

Author : William A. Link
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 462 pages
File Size : 20,98 MB
Release : 2000-11-09
Category : History
ISBN : 0807862991

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Focusing on the cultural conflicts between social reformers and southern communities, William Link presents an important reinterpretation of the origins and impact of progressivism in the South. He shows that a fundamental clash of values divided reformers and rural southerners, ultimately blocking the reforms. His book, based on extensive archival research, adds a new dimension to the study of American reform movements. The new group of social reformers that emerged near the end of the nineteenth century believed that the South, an underdeveloped and politically fragile region, was in the midst of a social crisis. They recognized the environmental causes of social problems and pushed for interventionist solutions. As a consensus grew about southern social problems in the early 1900s, reformers adopted new methods to win the support of reluctant or indifferent southerners. By the beginning of World War I, their public crusades on prohibition, health, schools, woman suffrage, and child labor had led to some new social policies and the beginnings of a bureaucratic structure. By the late 1920s, however, social reform and southern progressivism remained largely frustrated. Link's analysis of the response of rural southern communities to reform efforts establishes a new social context for southern progressivism. He argues that the movement failed because a cultural chasm divided the reformers and the communities they sought to transform. Reformers were paternalistic. They believed that the new policies should properly be administered from above, and they were not hesitant to impose their own solutions. They also viewed different cultures and races as inferior. Rural southerners saw their communities and customs quite differently. For most, local control and personal liberty were watchwords. They had long deflected attempts of southern outsiders to control their affairs, and they opposed the paternalistic reforms of the Progressive Era with equal determination. Throughout the 1920s they made effective implementation of policy changes difficult if not impossible. In a small-scale war, rural folk forced the reformers to confront the integrity of the communities they sought to change.

Author : Dewey W. Grantham
Publisher : Univ Tennessee Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,35 MB
Release : 2016
Category : History
ISBN : 9781621902157

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This is the most comprehensive synthesis of the political history of the American South during the Progressive Era. Originally published in 1983, this work represented the master work of a gifted historian's career of reflecting on this period of the region's history. This new printing is accompanied by an insightful foreword by William A. Link, addressing the work's continuing relevance for today's students.

Author : Dewey W. Grantham
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 12,12 MB
Release : 2021-10-21
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0813184223

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Southern-style politics was one of those peculiar institutions that differentiated the South from other American regions. This system—long referred to as the Solid South—embodied a distinctive regional culture and was perpetuated through an undemocratic distribution of power and a structure based on disfranchisement, malapportioned legislatures, and one-party politics. It was the mechanism that determined who would govern in the states and localities, and in national politics it was the means through which the South's politicians defended their region's special interests and political autonomy. The history of this remarkable institution can be traced in the gradual rise, long persistence, and ultimate decline of the Democratic Party dominance in the land below the Potomac and the Ohio. This is the story that Dewey W. Grantham tells in his fresh and authoritative account of the South's modern political experience. The distillation of many years of research and reflection, is both a synthesis of the extensive literature on politics in the recent South and a challenging reinterpretation of the region's political history.

Author : Giselle Roberts
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 24,86 MB
Release : 2019-02-07
Category : History
ISBN : 1611179262

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“Stories of personal tragedy, economic hardship, and personal conviction . . . a valuable addition to both southern and women’s history.” —Journal of Southern History From the 1890s to the end of World War I, the reformers who called themselves progressives helped transform the United States, and many women filled their ranks. Through solo efforts and voluntary associations both national and regional, women agitated for change, addressing issues such as poverty, suffrage, urban overcrowding, and public health. Southern Women in the Progressive Era presents the stories of a diverse group of southern women—African Americans, working-class women, teachers, nurses, and activists—in their own words, casting a fresh light on one of the most dynamic eras in US history. These women hailed from Virginia to Florida and from South Carolina to Texas and wrote in a variety of genres, from correspondence and speeches to bureaucratic reports, autobiographies, and editorials. Included in this volume, among many others, are the previously unpublished memoir of civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded a school for black children; the correspondence of a textile worker, Anthelia Holt, whose musings to a friend reveal the day-to-day joys and hardships of mill-town life; the letters of the educator and agricultural field agent Henrietta Aiken Kelly, who attempted to introduce silk culture to southern farmers; and the speeches of the popular novelist Mary Johnson, who fought for women’s voting rights. Always illuminating and often inspiring, each story highlights the part that regional identity—particularly race—played in health and education reform, suffrage campaigns, and women’s club work. Together these women’s voices reveal the promise of the Progressive Era, as well as its limitations, as women sought to redefine their role as workers and citizens of the United States.

Author : Michael Dennis
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 31,47 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Education
ISBN : 9780252026171

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Lessons in Progress provides a detailed look at how progressivism transformed higher education in the New South. Orchestrated by an alliance of northern philanthropists and southern intellectuals, modernizing universities focused on practical, utilitarian education aimed at reinvigorating the South through technological advancement. They also offered an institutional vehicle by which a new, urban middle class could impose order on a society in flux. Michael Dennis charts the emergence of the modern southern university through the administrations of four university presidents: Edwin Alderman (Virginia), Samuel C. Mitchell (South Carolina), Walter Barnard Hill (Georgia), and Charles Dabney (Tennessee). He shows how these administrative leaders worked to professionalize the university and to knit together university and state agencies, promoting a social service role in which university personnel would serve as expert advisors on everything from public health to highway construction. Dennis also explains how the programs of educational progressives perpetuated traditional divisions of race, sex, and class. The Tuskegee/Hampton model favored industrial education for blacks whose labor would support the South's expanding urban industrial complex, while education for women was careful not to disturb conventional notions of a woman's place. White workers found themselves subject to an increasingly centralized system of education that challenged their traditional independence. State universities in the New South were not isolated enclaves of classical learning but rather were inextricably tied to social reform initiatives. Seeking a more practical and socially responsible form of education, university modernizers succeeded in establishing the framework of a more modern, bureaucratic state. Despite their accomplishments, however, they failed to generate the kind of economic progress they had envisioned for the South.

Author : Walter Nugent
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 12,54 MB
Release : 2009-12-16
Category : History
ISBN : 0199746559

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After decades of conservative dominance, the election of Barack Obama may signal the beginning of a new progressive era. But what exactly is progressivism? What role has it played in the political, social, and economic history of America? This very timely Very Short Introduction offers an engaging overview of progressivism in America--its origins, guiding principles, major leaders and major accomplishments. A many-sided reform movement that lasted from the late 1890s until the early 1920s, progressivism emerged as a response to the excesses of the Gilded Age, an era that plunged working Americans into poverty while a new class of ostentatious millionaires built huge mansions and flaunted their wealth. As capitalism ran unchecked and more and more economic power was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, a sense of social crisis was pervasive. Progressive national leaders like William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as muckraking journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, and social workers like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald answered the growing call for change. They fought for worker's compensation, child labor laws, minimum wage and maximum hours legislation; they enacted anti-trust laws, improved living conditions in urban slums, instituted the graduated income tax, won women the right to vote, and laid the groundwork for Roosevelt's New Deal. Nugent shows that the progressives--with the glaring exception of race relations--shared a common conviction that society should be fair to all its members and that governments had a responsibility to see that fairness prevailed. Offering a succinct history of the broad reform movement that upset a stagnant conservative orthodoxy, this Very Short Introduction reveals many parallels, even lessons, highly appropriate to our own time. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Author : Kristofer Allerfeldt
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 785 pages
File Size : 15,81 MB
Release : 2017-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1351883488

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Few periods in American history have been explored as much as the Progressive Era. It is seen as the birth-place of modern American liberalism, as well as the time in which America emerged as an imperial power. Historians and other scholars have struggled to explain the contradictions of this period and this volume explores some of the major controversies this exciting period has inspired. Investigating subjects as diverse as conservation, socialism, or the importance of women in the reform movements, this volume looks at the lasting impact of this productive, yet ultimately frustrated, generation's legacy on American and world history.

Author : Mary Macdonald Ogden
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 50,42 MB
Release : 2015-12-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1611175690

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In Wil Lou Gray: The Making of a Southern Progressive from New South to New Deal, Mary Macdonald Ogden examines the first fifty years of the life and work of South Carolina's Wil Lou Gray (1883-1984), an uncompromising advocate of public and private programs to improve education, health, citizen participation, and culture in the Palmetto State. Motivated by the southern educational reform crusade, her own excellent education, and the high levels of illiteracy she observed in South Carolina, Gray capitalized on the emergent field of adult education before and after World War I to battle the racism, illiteracy, sexism, and political lethargy commonplace in her native state. As state superintendent of adult schools from 1919 to 1946, one of only two such superintendents in the nation, and through opportunity schools, adult night schools, pilgrimages, and media campaigns—all of which she pioneered—Gray transformed South Carolina's anti-illiteracy campaign from a plan of eradication to a comprehensive program of adult education. Ogden's biography reveals how Gray successfully secured small but meaningful advances for both black and white adults in the face of harsh economic conditions, pervasive white supremacy attitudes, and racial violence. Gray's socially progressive politics brought change in the first decades of the twentieth century. Gray was a refined, sophisticated upper-class South Carolinian who played Canasta, loved tomato aspic, and served meals at the South Carolina Opportunity School on china with cloth napkins. She was also a lifelong Democrat, a passionate supporter of equality of opportunity, a masterful politician, a workaholic, and in her last years a vociferous supporter of government programs such as Medicare and nonprofits such as Planned Parenthood. She had a remarkable grasp of the issues that plagued her state and, with deep faith in the power of government to foster social justice, developed innovative ways to address those problems despite real financial, political, and social barriers to progress. Her life is an example of how one person with bravery, tenacity, and faith in humanity can grasp the power of government to improve society.