San Antonio College Library

Lively and anecdotal in style, this volume offers a general account of the industrial and economic, social and political history of the period from 1865 to 1901. Cashman focuses on the amazing developments in industry during the period, and describes the complementary social history of immigration, urbanization and labor unions, and the shift from a rural agrarian nation to an urban industrual one. He also covers the political stories of Reconstruction...

"This is a comprehensive examination of the use of violence by conservative southerners in the post-Civil War South to subvert Federal Reconstruction policies, overthrow Republican state governments, restore Democratic power, and reestablish white racial hegemony. Historians have often stressed the limited and even conservative nature of Federal policy in the Reconstruction South. However, George C. Rable argues, white southerners saw the intent and...

Marcia Jacobson's Being a Boy Again identifies a literary genre that flourished between the Civil War and World War I - the American boy book. Jacobson distinguishes the boy book tradition from the didactic story for boys and the developmental autobiography of childhood, describing it as an autobiographical form that concentrates on boyhood alone. She discusses what gave rise to the boy book, what forms it took, what problems it addressed, and finally,...

Tera Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former master. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized....

Using the new institutional economics, Professors Alston and Ferrie show how paternalism in Southern agriculture helped shape the growth of the American welfare state in the hundred years following the Civil War. Paternalism was an integral part of agricultural contracts prior to mechanization. It involved the exchange of "good and faithful" labor services for a variety of in-kind services, most notably protection from physical violence. The Southern...

"Written by a direct descendant of the McMullan family, The Elusive Eden is the first study of Frank McMullan's colony. The book sheds new light on a forgotten episode of Texas and Latin American history. Drawing on a vast body of unpublished documentary material, some still in private hands, it opens a new vista on the troubled years following the Civil War."--back cover.

While great strides have been made in documenting the historical experiences and actions of middle-class white women in United States, scholarship on racial ethnic women has begun to appear only in recent years as women of color and other scholars have broadened the base of inquiry in women's history. Without a window into the lives of racial ethnic women our understanding of the meanings and dynamics of various forms of social inequality will be...