San Antonio College Library

Prior to the Civil War, both the North and South rallied energetic support for the causes of abolitionism and slavery by evoking the imagery of subversive conspiracies. The book examines these alleged conspiracies within the concept of the paranoid style, a psychological device for projecting various symbols of evil on an opponent to build emotional unity through feelings of alarm and peril. Examines the origins of conspiratorial imagery and analyzes...

Reporting on attitudes and reactions in each of the eleven states that were to form the Confederacy, William Cooper traces and analyzes the history of southern politics from the formation of the Democratic party in the late 1820s to the cessation of the Democratic-Whig struggle in the 1850s. He bases his study on extensive research of regional political manuscripts and newspapers.

"In late 1860 and early 1861, state-appointed commissioners traveled the length and breadth of the slave South carrying a fervent message in pursuit of a clear goal: to persuade the political leadership and the citizenry of the uncommitted slave states to join in the effort to destroy the Union and forge a new Southern nation." "Directly refuting the neo-Confederate contention that slavery was neither the reason for secession nor the catalyst for...

"In Thomas Dixon's novel that became the film The Birth of a Nation, the scalawag - a white southerner who supported Congressional Reconstruction and the Republican Party - is summarized as a "Judas Iscariot who sold his people for thirty pieces of silver, which he got for licking the feet of his conqueror and fawning on his Negro allies." Departures from this stereotypical view have appeared slowly since the 1940s as important revisionist historians...