Tag: Civil War

Grant Park, Atlanta

Grant Park, Atlanta

Steve Gallo

This article examines the role that Atlanta's Grant Park (1883) played in promoting the idea of social continuity between the Old and New Souths in the final decades of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, Atlanta's leaders successfully leveraged their city's quick recovery from the Civil War to present it as an exemplar of New South success that would lead the region into an era of prosperity. As they did, they simultaneously sought to reassure white citizens that the march into the future did not require them to abandon their cultural attachment to the romanticized Old South. Consequently, they simulated the purported environmental and social conditions of the antebellum period within the grounds of Grant Park in order to reassure white Atlantans that central tenets of antebellum society would be maintained amid the push for modernization. The result was a space that privileged a conception of southern identity premised on white supremacy and patriarchal control above all others and codified social difference within the landscape.

The Kinetic South

The Kinetic South

Alex Hofmann

Outside Waco, Texas, a staged train collision from 1896 known as the "Crash at Crush" illuminates how movement and speed formed an organizing principle and perceptual framework for everyday life in the modern New South. After the Civil War, Waco remained unscarred by battles and unphased by Reconstruction. On the promise of starting anew on antebellum terms, white southerners moved to Central Texas in mass migrations that set off a boom in the region's physical and economic development. Looking at directories, city guides, and newspapers, this article traces how white southerners sacralized movement as a racialized privilege that structured their perceptions of their natural, built, and social geographies.

The “Good Old Rebel” at the Heart of the Radical Right

The “Good Old Rebel” at the Heart of the Radical Right

Joseph M. Thompson, illustrations by Nate Beaty
The Original Southerners

The Original Southerners

Malinda Maynor Lowery
“Defend with True Hearts unto Death”

“Defend with True Hearts unto Death”

John Bardes
“Would to God I could tear the page from these memoirs and from my own memory”

“Would to God I could tear the page from these memoirs and from my own memory”

Edward John Harcourt
Sanctified by War

Sanctified by War

Dale Rosengarten
Cyclorama

Cyclorama

Daniel Judt
Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy by Winthrop D. Jordan (Review)

Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy by Winthrop D. Jordan (Review)

Charles Joyner
An Embattled Emblem

An Embattled Emblem

John Shelton Reed
The Confederate Flag and the Meaning of Southern History

The Confederate Flag and the Meaning of Southern History

Kevin Thornton
The Confederate Battle Flag in American History and Culture

The Confederate Battle Flag in American History and Culture

John M. Coski