Are you interested in this convocation presentation?

We have books available for check out

in front of the Circulation Desk!

You can also check out his website linked here.

Cover Art The Thin Light of Freedom by Edward L. Ayers
Call Number: 975.59 A977t 2017
Amid the devastation of war rise the first stirrings of freedom in this absorbing, ground-level narrative by an acclaimed historian. Virginia's Great Valley, prosperous in peace with a rich soil and an enslaved workforce, invited destruction in war. Voracious Union and Confederate armies ground up the valley, consuming crops, livestock, fences, and human life. Pitched battles at Gettysburg, Lynchburg, and Cedar Creek punctuated a cycle of vicious attacks and reprisals in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. North of the Mason-Dixon line, in the Pennsylvania portion of the valley, free black families sent husbands and sons to fight with the U.S. Colored Troops. In letters home, even as Lincoln commemorated the dead at Gettysburg, they spoke movingly of a war for emancipation. As defeat and the end of slavery descended on Virginia, with the political drama of Reconstruction unfolding in Washington, the crowded classrooms of the Freedmen's Bureau schools spoke of a new society struggling to emerge. Here is history at its best: powerful, insightful, grounded in human detail. 30 illustrations; 10 maps.
 
Cover Art The Promise of the New South by Edward L. Ayers
Call Number: 945.041 A977p 2007 c.2
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 alynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century.Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic Redeemers swept away thelegacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing theimportance of each in the emerging New South. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages.When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society.The Atlantic called it "one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years."
Cover Art The Southern Diaspora by James N. Gregory
Call Number: 304.809 G822s 2005
Between 1900 and the 1970s, twenty million southerners migrated north and west. Weaving together for the first time the histories of these black and white migrants, James Gregory traces their paths and experiences in a comprehensive new study that demonstrates how this regional diaspora reshaped America by "southernizing" communities and transforming important cultural and political institutions. Challenging the image of the migrants as helpless and poor, Gregory shows how both black and white southerners used their new surroundings to become agents of change. Combining personal stories with cultural, political, and demographic analysis, he argues that the migrants helped create both the modern civil rights movement and modern conservatism. They spurred changes in American religion, notably modern evangelical Protestantism, and in popular culture, including the development of blues, jazz, and country music. In a sweeping account that pioneers new understandings of the impact of mass migrations, Gregory recasts the history of twentieth-century America. He demonstrates that the southern diaspora was crucial to transformations in the relationship between American regions, in the politics of race and class, and in the roles of religion, the media, and culture.
 
Cover Art Way up North in Louisville by Luther Adams
Call Number: 307.208 A214w 2010
Luther Adams demonstrates that in the wake of World War II, when roughly half the black population left the South seeking greater opportunity and freedom in the North and West, the same desire often anchored African Americans to the South. Way Up North in Louisville explores the forces that led blacks to move to urban centers in the South to make their homes. Adams defines "home" as a commitment to life in the South that fueled the emergence of a more cohesive sense of urban community and enabled southern blacks to maintain their ties to the South as a place of personal identity, family, and community. This commitment to the South energized the rise of a more militant movement for full citizenship rights and respect for the humanity of black people. Way Up North in Louisville offers a powerful reinterpretation of the modern civil rights movement and of the transformations in black urban life within the interrelated contexts of migration, work, and urban renewal, which spurred the fight against residential segregation and economic inequality. While acknowledging the destructive downside of emerging postindustrialism for African Americans in the Jim Crow South, Adams concludes that persistent patterns of economic and racial inequality did not rob black people of their capacity to act in their own interests.
 
Cover Art Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles by Chad Berry
Call Number: 304.809 B534so (BC Scholarship Collection)
One of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history, the great white migration left its mark on virtually every family in every southern upland and flatland town. In this extraordinary record of ordinary lives, dozens of white southern migrants describe their experiences in the northern "wilderness" and their eradicable attachments to family and community in the South. Southern out-migration drew millions of southern workers to the steel mills, automobile factories, and even agricultural fields and orchards of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Through vivid oral histories, Chad Berry explores the conflict between migrants' economic success and their "spiritual exile" in the North. He documents the tension between factory owners who welcomed cheap, naive southern laborers and local "native" workers who greeted migrants with suspicion and hostility. He examines the phenomenon of "shuttle migration," in which migrants came north to work during the winter and returned home to plant spring crops on their southern farms. He also explores the impact of southern traditions--especially the southern evangelical church and "hillbilly" music--brought north by migrants. Berry argues that in spite of being scorned by Midwesterners for violence, fecundity, intoxication, laziness, and squalor, the vast majority of southern whites who moved to the Midwest found the economic prosperity they were seeking. By allowing southern migrants to assess their own experiences and tell their own stories, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles refutes persistent stereotypes about migrants' clannishness, life-style, work ethic, and success in the North.