The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction

by Edward L. Ayers

Book Overview

At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnic and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195085485
• ISBN13: 9780195085488
• Release Date: November 1993
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Rather than C. Vann Woodward

Wow, am I really the first person to review this book? Where to begin. I guess I'll keep it simple. This book is something of a response to C. Vann Woodward, and a much less biased review of the Reconstruction South. Ayers has done a lovely cultural history here, without the psychological baggage of Woodward. He's something of a "dates and statistics" man, so the narrative is frequently punctuated with such things. And like Starr's HUGE history of California, there's a particular emphasis on the history of institutions and biographical background. This is a terribly neglected period in Southern history, or one that has been needled to death by politically motivated writers such as Woodward and Cash. Take a look at this one if Cash leaves you rankled.