Product Description
Cities were the core of a changing economy and culture that penetrated the rural hinterland and remade the South in the decades following the Civil War.In New Men, New Cities, New South, Don Doyle argues that if the plantation was the world the slaveholders made, the urban centers of the New South formed the world made by merchants, manufacturers, and financiers.The book's title evokes the exuberant rhetoric of New South boosterism, which continually extolled the "new men" who dominated the city-building process, but Doyle also explores the key role of women in defining the urban upper class.

Doyle uses four cities as case studies to represent the diversity of the region and to illuminate the responses businessmen made to the challenges and opportunities of the postbellum South.Two interior railroad centers, Atlanta and Nashville, displayed the most vibrant commercial and industrial energy of the region, and both cities fostered a dynamic class of entrepreneurs.These business leaders' collective efforts to develop their cities and to establish formal associations that served their common interests forged them into a coherent and durable urban upper class by the late nineteenth century.The rising business class also helped establish a new pattern of race relations shaped by a commitment to economic progress through the development of the South's human resources, including the black labor force.But the "new men" of the cities then used legal segregation to control competition between the races.

Charleston and Mobile, old seaports that had served the antebellum plantation economy with great success, stagnated when their status as trade centers declined after the war.Although individual entrepreneurs thrived in both cities, their efforts at community enterprise were unsuccessful, and in many instances they remained outside the social elite.As a result, conservative ways became more firmly entrenched, including a system of race relations based on the antebellum combination of paternalism and neglect rather than segregation.Talent, energy, and investment capital tended to drain away to more vital cities.

In many respects, as Doyle shows, the business class of the New South failed in its quest for economic development and social reform.Nevertheless, its legacy of railroads, factories, urban growth, and changes in the character of race relations shaped the world most southerners live in today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Tracing the transition years
Doyle traces the transition years between Old South and New South in Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston and Mobile between 1860 and 1910.Wonderful compilation of both quantitative and qualitative sources; the sources from newspapers during the time act like time capsules into the period.The newspaper sources combined with some photographs and maps make Doyle's book a well-researched place for students of Southern history and culture to enjoy an insightful glimpse into particular loci in the south.Chapters include:
Preface
Acknowledgments
Urbanization of Dixie
The New Order of Things
Ebb Tide
Patrician and Parvenu
The Atlanta Spirit
The Charleston Style
New Class
Gentility and Mirth
The New Paternalism
Paternalism and Pessimism
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Students interested in the too-often forgetten urban south should get this book ... Read more

Product Description
"But for Birmingham," Fred Shuttleworth recalled President John F. Kennedy saying in June 1963 when he invited black leaders to meet with him, "we would not be here today." Birmingham is well known for its civil rights history, particularly for the violent white-on-black bombings that occurred there in the 1960s, resulting in the city's nickname "Bombingham." What is less well known about Birmingham's racial history, however, is the extent to which early city planning decisions influenced and prompted the city's civil rights protests. The first book-length work to analyze this connection, "The Most Segregated City in America": City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920-1980 uncovers the impact of Birmingham's urban planning decisions on its black communities and reveals how these decisions led directly to the civil rights movement.

Spanning over sixty years, Charles E. Connerly's study begins in the 1920s, when Birmingham used urban planning as an excuse to implement racial zoning laws, pointedly sidestepping the 1917 U.S. Supreme Court Buchanan v. Warley decision that had struck down racial zoning. The result of this obstruction was the South's longest-standing racial zoning law, which lasted from 1926 to 1951, when it was redeclared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the fact that African Americans constituted at least 38 percent of Birmingham's residents, they faced drastic limitations to their freedom to choose where to live. When in the1940s they rebelled by attempting to purchase homes in off-limit areas, their efforts were labeled as a challenge to city planning, resulting in government and court interventions that became violent. More than fifty bombings ensued between 1947 and 1966, becoming nationally publicized only in 1963, when four black girls were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Connerly effectively uses Birmingham's history as an example to argue the importance of recognizing the link that exists between city planning and civil rights. His demonstration of how Birmingham's race-based planning legacy led to the confrontations that culminated in the city's struggle for civil rights provides a fresh lens on the history and future of urban planning, and its relation to race. ... Read more

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The Wakeful Dead
Before the United States was a country, colonial burial grounds were called graveyards. They were unattractive, unhealthy and unsafe places of alcoholic gravediggers, grave robbers, partly dug up corpses, and poisonous gases.

Then, in 1778, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was buried in a white marble tomb on the Isle des Peupliers. This grave set the standard of beauty in nature for the 52-acre Pere-Lachaise cemetery outside Paris, in 1804. From France, the first rural garden cemetery of winding lanes, white sculptures and tombs, family care, and cultivated grounds in the United States was Mt Auburn, outside Boston.

In contrast, historic Magnolia, Old Catholic and Sha-arai Shomayim cemeteries were within the city limits of Mobile, Alabama. They were laid out in city-managed and -owned grids, with streets meeting at right angles. Like the rural cemeteries, though, they had artistic entrance gates, fences, plantings and sculptures.

Then, during the 1850s horticulturist Adolph Strauch took markers, trees and walls away from Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio. He favored mausolea large enough for entire families, kept up by hired staff under a director or superintendent, in open lawns. With the War between the States such lawn-park cemeteries made room for soldiers' rests, such as in Mobile's Magnolia cemetery. The design for these special burial plots and for national cemeteries, such as at Gettysburg, grew out of Frederick Law Olmstead's New York Central Park.

In 1913 entrepreneur Hubert Eaton laid out the first memorial park in the United States, at Forest Lawn cemetery, in Glendale, California. Hired groundskeepers worked easily around slender vases of artificial flowers, limited sculpture, large group vaults, and ground-level bronze plates. Forty years later, the port city's first memorial park opened, as Mobile Memorial Gardens, on the city's west side.

According to author John S Sledge, Mobile's CITIES OF SILENCE have become unattractive, unhealthy, and unsafe. This time around it's from inner city blight, grave robbing, vandalism and weeds. This time around, the answer may be, not in another remodeled style of burial grounds, but in successful historic preservation. In fact, Mobile already has clean-up campaigns, save our cemeteries societies, and walking tours. All this could, once again, make cemetery, from the Greek word for sleeping chamber, the perfect word for Mobile's historic Ahavas Chesed, Church Street, Magnolia, Old Catholic, and Sha-arai Shomyaim cemeteries. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from The Mississippi Quarterly, published by Mississippi State University on December 22, 1999. The length of the article is 685 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Tragedy and the Triumph of Phenix City, Alabama.(Review) (book review)
Author: Lee E. Ii Williams
Publication: The Mississippi Quarterly (Refereed)
Date: December 22, 1999
Publisher: Mississippi State University
Volume: 53Issue: 1Page: 181

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A powerful and unconventional look at contemporary America
This is a bold and powerful look at American life outside of political cliches like "evil corporations" and "evil Hollywood," thrown around by PBS / Naderites and conservatives respectively. Even though I am what Miller would consider a conservative, I could very much appreciate his book. It is a diagnosis like no other; it is coming straight from the heart of the beast -- a PR executive who realized the fine line between reality and fiction, advertising / entertainment and real life, and saw how it became uncoscionably blurred in post-Industrial America. I recommend Miller's inter-disciplinary(everything from economic sociology to art theory) book to anyone seeking an irreverent perspective on what at first glance seems to be a wornout subject. Prepare to be shocked!

A critical, and sometimes harsh, view of cultural decline
Miller's Egotopia presents an iconoclastic, highly critical view of modern America.Miller's central thesis is that the suppression of the public individual in favor of the private individual has had drastic consequences on our culture and environment; while Miller's focus is on aesthetics, his argument can be modified to bear on discussions of the environment and ethics as well.To blame for the rise of the private individual, Miller argues, are psychotherapy and neoclassical economics.The former is problematic in that it encourages individuals to satisfy primarily, if not only, their own egos.The latter replaces aesthetic, ethic, and cultural values with strictly economic value.The result of combining these two forces: the New American istaught to increase utility and profit at the expense of beauty, right, and goodness.All forms of value are replaced with economics; and, further, economic value is personal and subjective.The private individual is heralded as the measure of all things, and as a consequence society and culture decline.As a general warning, this book should probably not be read by economists, advertising agents, or "outdoor advertisers".For the rest of us, however, it serves as both an enlightening expose of the true American culture and a call to arms. ... Read more

Product Description
A biography of the Baptist minister, focusing on his leadership role in the civil rights movement. ... Read more