good evening, everyone. welcome to atlanta history center. i'm claire haley, president of democracy initiatives and author talks here for the history center. i'm sitting here tonight with three great scholars and very excited to have here atlanta history. tonight we're joined by fitzhugh brundage jon sensback and scott nelson. they are just three of many contributors to this new volume, a new history of the south. it just came a couple of weeks ago.

so we're very excited to be here in discussion with them tonight. and each are professors of history. each have different of expertise. we have a lot ground to cover tonight. and so i'm going to briefly introduce them and then we will jump right in. fitzhugh brundage sitting here on the end, he's the editor of this wonderful volume. he's the william b umstead, professor of history, the university of north at chapel hill. so welcome, folks, from north carolina. we appreciate you being here. and seated next to him is jon sensbach. he teaches early american history at the university of florida and drove up here from gainesville to join us. so we're very grateful to you, john, for being here tonight. okay. and lastly, on the end we have scott nelson, who is georgia athletic association professor of at the university of georgia drove over from athens today. thank you for being here with us today. scott thanks so much for having me, claire. so like i said, this book covers a lot of ground. it goes back several thousand,

actually, and takes us up pretty close to the present. so it truly is a comprehensive history of the south. but with so many contributor, with so much ground to cover, i thought we would start with just the basic question to the editor, and that is how did this project initially come about? well, it came when an editor from the university of north carolina press came to me two decades ago. and suggested that it was time to have an interpretive history of the american south. and i was keen to do it. but there life intervened and it took a longer it took longer than i would have expected. but part of the challenge was we wanted to pull together a team of really great scholars who i hope they won't be. we want to sort of mid to late mid-career. but it took us so to bring the

book out that we're a little further in our careers. right here, right but in any case, the goal was get people who would have fresh things say about the south and not just get fresh things said about the south. try to get the authors to work collaboratively so the book is an ensemble effort opposed to single authors post whole chapters. and i'll just say that makes it a little bit more challenging to write the book because you have to start with the early authors. so was one of the earliest contributors not in the period but also in content in the actual writing of it. and then we worked our way to the 20th century, so weaving that together was a conscious goal of the volume from the outset, and i think that's what distinguishes it, for example, from some of the other works that are either single author or else they are multi-volume

single author histories of the south and want to touch on the concept of south really quite before we move on to talking some more kind of content specific. but you know it's a new history the american south but i said it goes back to many, many years before the concept a united states would have existed. and in the introduction to the book you give some some guidance about what this book is not the things that it's not framed around. one of the things that as you know someone born in the race in the south made me kind giggle. as you said, this book, you know, it's not we're not looking at the this the through this lens of southern distinctiveness because we think we're so different or so special. but we're also not looking at the south through several different lenses as well. so how did you for purposes of this volume, how did you define the south and the place time period? what led you in that direction? well, with regards to time,

admittedly, this is book that focuses on the history of the region from before european contact, but largely through era of the emergence of the euro civilization and what we call the south. so while we do go back hundreds and hundreds, thousands of years, in some instances, the focus is really, we'll say, 1500 to the present. admittedly. but in thinking about that we didn't want to start with assumption that the history of the region was the history of europeans, the region. so and we also didn't want to start with the assumption that there was one moment in time when somehow south became the identifiable thing that we call the south so. it may sound complicated, but the way we work was backward, so to speak, we all think of the

south appropriately because it's the way we commonly talk about the south as essentially the states that were part of the confederacy and maybe some people throw kentuckian and oklahoman in and there are good reasons to do that. so we accept that that's the vernacular use of the south. but we wanted to look at the history of that territory throughout the entire span time as opposed to starting at, say, jamestown or saint augustine and then tracing european settlement from that. and the reason why that's important is the south looks very different in 1500 or 1600 or 1700 or 1800, for that matter. if you're paying attention to all of the people who live in what we now think of as the south as opposed to just essentially your own americans. so it makes a much more i call it cosmology in south. and john in your essay or your chapter indians africans in in

the early south so kind taking us from that but a foundation that fits just laid about you know naming what was the south so your work delves when the south what area that we now know is the south started to become populated with people besides the native inhabitants of of this region. so you talk a lot about how people from three different continents came together in a relatively not super area of land right for the first time for a lot of them. so can you talk about the early history of that initial contact and how the relationships between, the white settlers, native americans, enslaved africans brought over from africa, how those started out and how they changed over the course of the period that you're writing about, there was quite a stark difference where you start your work chapter in the book and then where you ended. yeah, i mean, the larger question to get back to.

what fitz was saying is, how do we define the south and the the sort of the earlier centuries that i was about, you know, like myself would write that period, you know, have conundrum. like how do you write about this region that became the south before it was the south and nobody in the year 17 said 1710 said oh i really like in the south so but but during that period from say 7600 up to say the middle of the 18th century. so i demographic changes where in the year 1600 you know essentially the entire population would have been, you know, indigenous people, native americans you know by the time the span of an english and eventually a french begin settling small pockets of colonization in florida and louisiana, virginia and the carolinas, and then begin

bringing enslaved africans. you see this profound transition where of disease warfare, trading the indigenous population begins to decline precipitously. so where they go from 100% of the population and in the year 1600, essentially by 1750, they are are down to about 20% of the population and the european african populations have risen dramatically by that point. paradoxically, though, most of the south, what we now call south was still in native. so west of the appalachian mountains, this was still native territory. this was still dominated by indigenous people, even though their populations begun to decline dramatically. so what you then see toward the period of the american revolution and into the 19th century was your americans and enslaved people beginning to push further, further south and

west, displacing indigenous people more so. so this period of 150, 250 years and you know, involves tremendous changes, population and culture and and economics and did look different and different depending on which country was settling them. because i think sometimes in the u.s., we have a tendency to talk about when we talk about early american history, we forget about florida. for some reason, the spanish were there like we tend to talk about the british colony. so did you see any trends or differences between, say, spanish or french, british, what that looked like? sure, of course. yeah. and that's one of the things that we tried to emphasize in this, is the fact that that you had all these different, you know, colonial projects going on with the french in louisiana. so you have a catholic zone of settlement along, the gulf coast from louisiana through, spanish, florida, and when you go north and, confront the carolinas, then that's settled by the

english. so there's there's a religious tension in there, catholic, protestant, the wars of religion that have started in europe, leave the atlantic and come come to the americas. and that that's very much a product of that with corresponding changes and and differences the way those those societies are structured a higher degree of incorporation of african-americans and indigenous people in the catholic then in then in protestant british colonies. example. yeah. so one of the other frames of the book that's laid out at the beginning is that the south is a region sees a lot of upheaval over many years. this isn't necessarily unique to justice south, but certainly is defining feature. so the third author we have with us tonight scott you talk about your risk it forward couple of hundred years stay with me you're essay focuses on the

aftermath of the civil war so we're starting out talking about conception of the south the people moving and forming we now know is that territory and in many ways the civil war you a situation where 40% of the southern population give or take went from considered property and eyes of the law to becoming citizens some of them the men that case being considered for at least the time voting citizens. so you really have a massive demographic shift there and the shift in the conception of who gets to be a southerner, who gets to participate in society. your essay is entitled the bourbon. was a first of i wonder if you could enlighten us on the title. then you start out a lot of atlanta history, so our audience tonight i thought that might be fun to dig into yeah so the bourbons are it immediately

after the war you have black and white settlers moving in to the south or the florida southern homestead act. lots of black families getting you're buying. we see a tremendous number of people growing cotton for the first time who'd never grown cotton before and. the bourbons are the ones who are the story about bourbons in france is that they that never forget. what about what's the expression that they that they they never learn and they never forget it. so and so the bourbons are the people who come in and try retake the south and make it a white enclave in which you know white southerners are kind of ruled the roost and. so they're called the bourbons by their critics, the populists and others, because they they just want to remember, again and again what the south was before,

the war, what the south was during the civil war. and so that that obsession kind of and, you know, dressing up as confederate generals, dressing up as old planters, all of this memorialized and where you trying to recreate some imagined south and ironically the south is actually being brought together for the first time after the war. the southern states actually weren't connected by and large by railroads. they were so, so much so supported by the southern individually that they prevent it the states from joining each other. north carolina didn't any traffic going to south carolina south carolina didn't want any crowd to go into georgia. it's really only when the confederacy comes in that you see a continuous railroad that goes from richmond to atlanta. so atlanta is not a place really of any until the confederacy brings bridges know atlanta to richmond largely to feed the and and then you start to see a south that goes all the way to texas and you start to see this

convergence. the peculiar thing about that is this environmental catastrophe that then follows when you bring these railroads through and you start to see yellow fever and all these other diseases that had previously just been coastal spreading throughout the u.s., pellagra and scurvy and a lot of other diseases that are uniquely southern, that to do with all this cheap that starts coming in by railroad into the south and that cheap food doesn't have riboflavin, it doesn't have vitamin c, it doesn't have iron. and so lots and lots of white and black people are eating food. that's not especially good for them. and so you see this slowness, all of these diseases and all of these other things. so the south is kind of, i would argue becomes something in this trade there really is a kind of south but it's one that's at least for people like henry grady in atlanta is about remembering kind of south that in which you know the moonlight and magnolias kind of story of

the south henry grady with the atlanta journal-constitution kind of puts together as a bourbon the way of excluding black people from voting. so he kind of comes up with the supreme court, comes up with this way of preventing black people from voting not explicitly but implicitly. and that's that's the kind of story of the south. and the bourbon south is the kind of arrival, the bourbon triumvirate in atlanta, who they still see when you go into the statehouse and the bourbon ensures that it's by and large only going to be black people, white people that are going to be voting and only white people that are going to be on juries. that's when we see the rise of lynching that's when we see all of the other kind of ills, that distinctive part of the south are building off of that. digging into some of the macon nicks of that a little bit more with this question is open to anyone. can you talk a little more about you mentioned the supreme court specifically. there are some other things that are more georgia or even atlanta specific. would you go into that a little

bit? yeah. so so georgia, so most of the cotton, that's in the south is, you know, you need 200 frost free days to grow cotton. and so it's kind of the deep south that grows cotton after the war, when the railroads come, the only way you can get credit is from, you know, all the banks are destroyed by the war. the confederates come, they take all the gold out of the vaults, they give them confederate bonds. and then after the war's, the bonds are useless or are valueless. and so the only way to get credit is to cotton. and that means that people who are up around here, up in the hills, who would never have grown cotton in thirties or 1840s, are suddenly growing cotton. the only thing that you can get cash and and credit for it. so country stores and all these other things when you think about the cracker, we think about it as an old fashioned thing. but the cracker barrel was the cutting of the south in the 1860s and 1870s. it was the institution that gave you credit for growing cotton, that provided you the food that

you needed provided all these things and so a lot of distinctive things that we think of as distinctively southern, very much new things and atlanta becomes the hub, the southern railway, consolidating run by radical republicans. initially, that that joins the south together and most of the cotton. then a lot of the cotton ends up going out of virginia rather then through georgia. so georgia becomes a kind of colony in a its relationship. the u.s. economy changes pretty drastically as well. i think it's interesting you mention henry grady and the moonlight magnolias kind of conception, but then you also think about what he was known for, which was the phrase new south, right? so explain. how do you get back to the past? and then you're saying we're making something so. so he he gave a speech at the union league in 18 oh and around 1880 or 81, is that right?

that's yeah. in he says, you know, we welcome you to the south, the south thrilling with new and imagines the south as a and we first start to see the south as a kind of female character. the south needs capital. the south is thrilling with you investment and and in fact what he's offering is women he's offering lots and lots of white who have lost husbands or fathers during the civil war. so there's a, you know, a very large number. white men are wiped out, black men as well. but a lot of white men who are wiped out by the itself. and so there are all these unattached women. atlanta is a city of women, black and white women. and are going to be the hands that going to work in the cotton mills. and so rather than growing cotton, we're also to see industrialization and urbanization and industrialization the urbanization in the south is not actually all it's not what we see here. it's these 20 story buildings.

it's taking cotton and turning it into cloth and it's taking timber and turning it into furniture. it's taking tobacco and turning it into cigarets it's taking the raw materials and going one step up. that's what the south is. and so when we talk about urbanization, industrialization in places like atlanta, we're talking about taking those raw materials and just one more thing with them. absolutely. and i want to go back a little bit before the the civil war, because i want to touch on, john, some of what you kind left off with, because obviously we skipped a large time period right. so during time there was a shift. you know and the way that that africa enslaved africans, african-americans and white people were relating to one another. i wanted to ask i don't want to leave this out about the native american piece. so you talked about how the population was declining due to disease due to war, due to other factors.

but as the definition of the south expands to start, including things like oklahoma, where course there's a large native american population. so can you talk a little bit about while this is going on? singleton say, what do we see going on in the lead up to the civil war? it's getting back with a native american because that becomes, of course, very important after the civil war to, well well, as i said during you know, during 18th century, most of the south, though, the preponderance of the population was was steadily becoming more and more european, african and indigenous population was declining even after the american revolution. well, the 19th century, most of the south was still claimed native people and still occupied their what you see, though, from from the period essentially when the constitution and know in 1788 and you know up until the first two or three decades of

the 19th century is an increasing pressure driven largely by the government as well speculators and privateers to acquire native land and dispossessed people from their homeland. and and so what you see gradually under, you know, especially under andrew jackson, is a sense that native people, for their own good need be removed to, make way for white settlers and for the expansion of cotton. the scot is talking about the indian removal proper. best known, better known as the indian dispossession act. you know, get signed 30 and so the federal government is then as to moving indigenous people so from from florida from the carolinas you know from, arkansas people west and

dispossessed relocated in oklahoma. so when it says there's good reason to think of oklahoma as being part of an extended south that that's that's one big reason why that would be the case and the others thinking back on and with one observation we tend to think about violent dispossession of native americans, especially in the west and all of the tradition of western movies in the violence that it depicts of. u.s. calvary men versus indians. but it's worth remembering the bloodiest war against american was fought in florida. the wars which go there, three of them. and so the violent occupation of florida is very much part of the story of the emergence, what we now call the modern south. and through this whole book, i think one of the themes that you all talk about in your work and, all the other authors talk about

in their work is this idea of explore kind of the concept of who gets to be considered southern in case, so whose history is going to included in this book is very different than whose history would have been included in a book like this 50 years ago. and i'd love to hear from all of you about that process and in the scholarship as well. so both within this work but this is obviously a reflection of many other that you all have been working on for quite some time. can you talk about how definition of southern has gotten expanded? kind of where you see that potentially going forward? well, i, i certainly think that the definition has been utterly transformed and over the last half century and there it's not just i would call it a no pun intended, a revolution in the study the early south when i was in graduate the center colonial

scholarship was still new england in middle atlantic. i mean, there was wonderful scholarship, the chesapeake bay, but that was really the kind of southern extension if somebody so there there was a particular focus on early american history that excluded large parts of the south in addition, we think back that it's not really until the 1970s that there starts to be a large body of scholars on women black women, women, white women in the american south prior to 1970, you could count on two hands perhaps, but probably the major scholarly works that talked about women. and then the on black southerners has just exploded in depth. we know so much more slavery than we did just 50 years ago. so i think it's not just that the definition of southerners

has changed, but the richness with which we can talk about all of the who we now call southerners has been transformed over the last years just and what we think of as southern. so many those things, understanding the african roots of you talk about the gullah and the geechee that we talk about the the sort of religious traditions and stuff like that that's in that comes out of new orleans. i talk about you talk about jazz. i about blues, talk about cooking and relationship to african traditions of food and feeding and that understanding that part of the south means that a lot of the thing that we think of that are actually interesting about the south that are actually beautiful the south actually come from the african part of the south and that that tradition is is lost the way in which that was spoken of before we get our accents from where southerners their accents from it used to be told as somehow

there was this english that was carried on in the chesapeake and we understand that it's an african kind of melding african and european traditions make much of the language that we talk about and also music is has this african american roots has native american roots. and that it's a richer south. it's south that we actually admire the south, that actually, like much of it is, we need to kind of see the gumbo there. we need to see the bringing together all these rich and complicated and struggling cultural. can i just jump in picking on crude? yeah. i like to tell my undergrad you it's. i asked him where is progresso. where did the progresso food company start? it's a new orleans company by sicilians. new orleans has the second largest sicilian population in the united states. and i asked them, what's the most famous sandwich you associate with new orleans? they say a po'boy. and i say, no, that's a much more recent it's a mouthful

letter, which is, again, a sicilian. it's sicilian influences being embraced in this incredibly interesting and cosmo fountain city i would say as well the the the sense of cultural and demographic diversity, you know, is really a function of this earlier period, the 16, 17th and 18th centuries when the south was a period was a place of incredible immigration, a destination for immigrants from the british isles, germany, from from switzerland, not france, know spain as well as. dozens and dozens of enslaved people from africa speaking many, many different languages, practicing different religions, encountering indigenous people. likewise many languages and practicing their traditions. so the i mean to me, that's when we think about southern distinctiveness and southern.

well a sense of southern uniqueness perhaps that this the collision of all these cultures, the 18th century was probably unprecedented. i think in the region history and contributes to all the kinds of gumbo that these scholars are talking about. go figure. yeah. i'd also say that, you know, the way in which the south used to be taught was jefferson and jackson and, the political elites and to me that everything that's interesting about the south comes from the slave quarter and, the hillbilly hide out, right? the places that are actually separated from the the kind of elite southern traditions and so telling south, telling the of that south is i think, interesting fascinating to people. i'll piggyback with one other thing that i think is important for us to remember about the south. when i was being introduced to the history of the south, always heard about the southern sense

of place and i don't deny southerners have a deep of place, but so do vermont laws. so the french quebeckers to lots of people have a sense of place. but one of the things i think is striking about southerners is we tend to think of rootedness and yet southerners have been in credibly and i mean this by african-american by indigenous they've been incredibly migratory people and for example, in the antebellum era, some of the most mobile americans, according to the census were virginians who were migrating out of virginia in numbers larger than migrating out of new england so that there those southerners who were whether they be coerced or they're moving by choice who are populating tenets of the mississippi river valley. they're all moving all the time and then they're moving into louisiana or they're moving into the mississippi delta.

so it's a very mobile population in this region that we tend to think of as being very saddened. and that's because we think about the southerners who stayed behind and forget about all those southerners who are migrating out to texas, then migrating out to bakersfield or migrating to chicago and detroit or pittsburgh. so it's a mobile people adjusting to generational upheaval after upheaval. we're talking earlier about how scholarship on southern and the former decades tended to focus on just specific groups of people, specific histories. i mean, now the that we have, we have access to where continuing to study is much more rich and inclusive of lots of different types people and i did want to ask about sources because i think can sometimes be a little confusing to people. well, if it's history, it

happened. can it be new history? so i wonder and each of you say such different aspects of southern history, i always think interesting to know how how that process has changed over the years of research actually, where you find some of this really cool stuff that you write about. i got to go a story about henry grady. so there's henry woodfin grady who everyone has about, you know, the editor of the atlanta constitution. but luckily, me as a scholar, there was another henry henry grady, who a railway carpenter and the southern historical collection usc bought a sight unseen. this massive collection of white railroad workers letters to his sister because they thought he was that henry grady and so that was fantastic for me. the bound side of this is that he wrote on brown paper with a purple crayon because that's what he used for measuring wood with. and so and his spelling was atrocious. it was really awful.

but henry a grady, is horrified by the south. he moves through the south, he builds the south, he builds these railroad bridges with. others, he's a railway carpenter and eventually becomes a construction foreman. and and and when he goes to louisiana, he says, it's so strange, it's so picayune here. it's so swampy and so ugly i can't you know, this i don't want to be in the south. and meanwhile, henry w grady is talking about how the south is one thing and we're all you know, this is this is the new south and it's it's the future sometimes the archive will lead to people. henry grady is a white railroad carpenter working guy, but he's the one kind of closest to the black workers who talks about the kind of environments that they're in and the kinds of the that they do. and and so it's the archive is always ready for a new kind of history. i think i would say that that

question is particularly acute for my period where the people that the authors, my team writing about the sort of the pre 18 pre 19th century south particularly writing about indigenous americans and african-americans where many of the sources most of the sources are actually written by. and so the question, how do you how can you study those if they didn't leave their own sources? and so this has been a question that has has really given a lot of food for thought over the past decades. and historians have made, you know, pretty good strides in recent years trying to use what limited do exist to try to uncover as best they can the thoughts the inner voices the the sense of personality that's revealed of indigenous people. african-americans, when written by european sources. it's it's a tricky thing. it's not easy to do but that's the question.

and then especially with indigenous history, archeology is a is a is a is a, you know, a tool that's essential for people who write about native american. so you work with whatever sources can and and you try make it as layered and as textured as possible, given the understanding that is not always easy to do. and i'll use an example that goes back to when i first came to atlanta, i wrote my dissertation, my first book about lynching in virginia and georgia and when i my research, you had to read newspapers on. so i 50 years of the atlanta constitution reading the first two pages and the fourth page which was the editorial page for 50 years. that's for those of you who have not in microfilm may not appreciate what that was it it

it my eyesight actually i had to wear glasses for a few and the on lynching has been transferred over the last 30 years. and particularly in the last few years. i'll just one example. the great southern historian stephen woodward devoted in his entire corpus of less than pages in all of his to the topic of lynching. no one would write a comparable study of the length of his book and devote so little space to it. but as i say, when i was my one of the reasons why was he not a he wasn't a newspaper researcher to begin with, but the research that i it took me literally a year and a half to do from my dissertation. you now do in two ts well you could do it in the milicic, but

then you'd have to read the stories on newspapers dot com or the atlanta to atlanta constitution dot com. so in other words, to be able to do the research to track down lynching evidence is infinite personally easier now than it was just 30 years ago. and we know in more about just lynchings, but also about attempted lynchings, which were incredibly hard to track down previously. so that would be an instance where the knowledge, so to speak, was inert. but technology has made it possible to get to it so much more easily than. we could have, ten years ago or 30 years ago. one of the reasons was a source that i use as folklore and, particularly black music. so this story of john henry is something i've written a book about, but also all of these track liner songs that sung and

then collected in the 19 teens and twenties but go from the 1880s to the 19 teens and track liner songs sung by men who lined in line, tracked 100,000 of them in the american south in 1900, those songs are by people. it was, you know, if they're alive in 1880. it was illegal for them to read in 1860, right. and so getting hearing their voices is very, very and and so that's why folklore and folk songs, many which become blues songs, are a source that we can use and discovered tremendous material about so well we are going to move to audience questions here in just a minute. so thinking about all of the great questions i know that you're going to have for for our panel tonight, but want to take it to each of you. you know, you teach i think both of you teach both undergraduate and graduates, right? so you're around a lot of a lot of young people. you also write books that that

people who are not and who are not students actually want to read. so thank you. it was very well written and like lots to dig into you there. so this the book obviously started as noted earlier many, many years ago, but it came out during a very interesting time and i think we always live in interesting times, but i'll call it an interesting time and an interesting moment for history right now because there's a lot in the every day and a lot of disagreements over whose history gets to be taught how it gets to be taught, why it's important or not important to teach and then what what some the stuff actually means. so i how you encounter that in your classrooms as i'm sure you do every day versus when you get to to get out a little bit and talk with with folks who aren't currently students. how have these conversations in the public sphere shaped not your scholarship that you it's a

very very rich question and it's it's also a moving target because for example north carolina there's legislation before the state legislature at this moment that will transform the way k through 12 students in the state learn history. but i guess what i would say is two things we have we're a world in which ap history influences what anybody in high school in the united states learns about american history. now and yet on the other hand, we now have increasingly a kind of politicization of what we learn and what is taught in schools and i, i actually and fairly optimist that we the those of us who are committed to the study of history, the teaching of history, i like to

say we have the facts on, our side and if if we have to engage in debates, the past, i think we're in a pretty good position to, hold our own and don't say that with you know pollyannish. but if if people us to talk about teach the history of free market capitalism in the united states, bring it on. let's start talking about slavery and it fit into free market capitalism or let's start talking about railroad ties and the funding of railroads and what that meant, as you describe for people who would used to be self-sufficient farmers but then had to enter into the marketplace in order to get access to funding. so in my own way, i think it'll be a trench warfare to to use military metaphor, it's going to be a long, arduous struggle. i still think the facts are on

our side. i say, well, since i teach in florida, a state which has seen some politicization of the curriculum of past year or so, this is a question that we think about all the time in the classroom. i'll give you one example, which is that in i just finished teaching course on the american revolution, those of you who who have been following the controversy about the 1619 project, which came out in few years ago, and one of the contentions of the 1619 project was that the preservation of slavery was a a driving inspiration for the american revolution itself. and while the claim was not new, been made by many historians along before the 1619 project came along, it somehow resonated the public and became very controversial. so we talked about that in, our class and you know, to try to get students to to to weigh the evidence and you know, to what extent if any, was was slavery a

part of the rationale for the american revolution self and and you we looked at the evidence and the evidence is pretty clear it was not the only rationale but it was a rationale it's in the declaration of independence and. and so, you know, the students, you know, i had i had to make them aware the controversy and, you know, what do you think about this? and so, i mean, this is the way in which historians operate from using evidence, looking at arguments, looking at counterarguments try to come to your own best conclusions. and, you know, so if we do that as a society to take these controversial things and what is so about thinking about this and what what role does a state actually have in dictating what can and can't be taught in the classroom? we have to counter those things with with an honest look at the history based on evidence that's what we do. and that's what my students did and they concluded that yes, slavery was part of the american

revolution. i i'm going to go at this orthogonal, i think, because i like the question about teaching and writing. and to me, teaching is and i, i teach the big survey, 300 students. and these are the students who did not get a five on the ap exam. so. so they got the three in the four and they are not history majors. they will never be history majors. they will be dragged kicking and screaming into history. and i love that. i love being the person who has, you know, and they can't graduate from without having a history a u.s. history course. so i say, look, you know, you're going to take you take a class, going to get a job, you're going to and the job is going to be very closely related to the to the course take. so agricultural economics or whatever a fashion design you're going to you're going to get into that job and you're going to hate your life and you're going to drink yourself to death or you can think about where you fit in.

in the past in the long past, the american history, how do you fit in? how other people cope with world around them? how did they confront the problems of their generations and how will you do it? that's the question i'm going to save you from alcoholism. want to save you from that world. and so let's to talk about american history. and then when i talk your period, i say so we can understand american history, the the colonization without because they're all drugs, coffee sugar, tobacco, cocoa and so basically this is a drug world where if we think about the american south as a world of drugs that are being shipped to europeans. so i think i think trying to get their attention, the attention of an engineering who would rather be anywhere else, would rather be stuck in traffic than be in an american history class. when you when you get them excited about history, when you get them to think, you know, turn their head and think a little bit differently about it, then i think my job is done and

there's a feedback loop where when teach and you get students excited and get interested, then you think, oh, that's actually a good story. i need to write that down. right, i need to tell that story. so to me that's the exciting thing about history as a writing discipline is that it can grow out of a good class and it's often really good, really sharp, really skeptical questions from students that often push me to the ask me, you know, what is what is the financial have to do with the colonization of the new world and the creation of slavery not to go back and at it and think about it a little more and so so i there's to me a really exciting about skeptical students and teaching skeptical students and learning how to tell a story that works. and then going back to the sources, of course, because we're all we can't just tell a good story. we have to we have to have the sources that that are on our side. and that's and i think so much

of this book is like that right? it's it's these are these are some of the best gems that we've kept right for our classes that we have decided. but to boil down into, to present to your story about the great london fire of 66 and how it is a really important precursor to the coming of slavery in the south of the transition to slavery. the virginia colonies has a lot to do with the london of 1666 that, you know, that's that's fascinating and and makes you think twice and i think that's the book is filled observations and nuggets like that are just fantastic. yes i completely agree and never a bad thing to push everyone actually show their work and show their sources. right. so anything you know that it's those questions coming. actually, i think an opportunity. right to to talk about things that maybe we haven't we haven't talked about collectively before, but we want to hear from you now. so i'm sure there are lots of

questions. so please raise your hand and high so we can see you and. the microphone will come to you. okay. how important were slave narratives in, african-american oral histories in your research and actually outcome of the book? i often start off briefly. i think particularly in martha jones chapter and kate mayes there's chapter. so chapters that deal with the anti i'll call them the early republic. so roughly. 20 to 1860, the slave narratives definitely are important as. well, as particularly martha jones is interested in how black we will call them now black southerners are seeing themselves as residents of the region and as americans and as

members of a black diaspora to an african diaspora. so their voice is very important. and again, kate mesa's chapter, she actually uses solomon. solomon northup as a kind of organizing figure. so they are definitely an important, important voice. but i'll just say that the slave narratives in 1933 collected in the during the depression are great, not for the period of slavery, but for the period after slavery. so if you want to talk about black life in the 1870s, 1880, zora neale hurston is one of the people who's collecting these materials and her descriptions of. the kind of intricacies of black life grow out of the slave narrative in the fantastic forces forces. what impact did the great

migration and have on the economy the demographics of the south and was there resistance to people trying to move to chicago, new york especially employers when their employees were trying to move away to those urban areas of north. it's sort of the great migration is not in my period. it's it's work that's later. no, it's it's it's very important it's important it's critical to understand sort of what makes the great migration possible, which is a war in world. one submarine warfare makes it impossible for employers in detroit and chicago to get a stream of europe workers. and so we see sweeping across borders and others bring newspapers from detroit and chicago down to the south to show them about people about the opportunities that are available and those there's a there's a there's a massive migration that

does it changes the north. and in an ways it also but what it changes about the south is is equally important that there's a kind of continuous of people back and forth called chitlin circuit, which is a sort of tradition and of what we think of as the blues comes out of, that tradition and we see a lot of the most horrific violence that comes up is the period after formerly we talk about lynching as being sort of 1877 to 1914. but, but it's the red summer 1919 that sees tremendous violence against black people in many parts of the south. in fact, i have a son who just wrote about red in 1919. so it's fresh in my mind. and we see. yes, sort the destruction of important black cities, black

towns where black people are thriving that are just grim and so that that is discussed in that in the 20th century. so it's out of my field, out of my period. but there's a great deal. the talk about red summer in particular and i'll just add your question, efforts to stop it. there were definitely efforts to stop it. for example, here in there were efforts to stop trains from leaving savannah and elsewhere. but there's the classic example of way american federalism and capitalism work. there were, course recruiting agents coming down, northern industrial centers, recruiting blacks to migrate. and so are just as there are people trying keep them in the south white landowners, white employers. there are also white employees in the north, moving heaven and earth to get them to come north. so there were subsidies to migrate, etc. . so there there's a tugging and

there's they're countervailing forces in way. and then of course, black people in the south, many of them were very eager to get out. and so they they found their way. i'm interested your comments on the way in which white supremacy and in south created distortions in constitutional law and in the legal structure not only in the south but federally and you think those distortions persist today, and if so, in what form? i want to go first. yeah. wow. so one of the things i mean, so some of these are constitutional and some of them aren't. so so one thing that occurs me is that there were things called

the black codes passed in. 1866 by i when white when andrew johnson president he brings in it basically allows southern states to reconstruct themselves with just white voters they create a bunch of laws that make it basically illegal to be black and in a city. and you have to have papers and things like that. the 14th amendment is an attempt and the military radical reconstruction is called is an attempt to prevent that from happening. right. and so to say, okay, these states are not the congress says these states are not states any more their territory is they'll be military governors. they'll have to be, you know, bring peace to these regions. they can be brought back in as states. and so i would argue that the black codes went away in 1866 so that the form the things that formerly that black people cannot, you know, enter into marriages, testify against white people, those things are stricken state constitutions. but there are many other things like very, very high.

fees. so so a relatively low amount of if you want, if you take something that's worth less, anything more than $10, it's a felony. in 1866, in virginia, the bar was $30. in virginia before the war. and there's an attempt identify things that are associated with that they see as associated with black and women that take those things for misdemeanor and turn them into felonies. and so that the 14th amendment there attempts the 14th amendment for the states to sort of get the 14th amendment the way they do that constitutionally, we sort of call the supreme court cases the sorry, the supreme court cases, the civil rights cases and those basically say as long as the state doesn't say it's designed to exclude people, it's okay. right. so the 14th amendment still holds as a citizen, you can't deny citizenship based on race,

color, previous condition of servitude. but if if a state a law and it doesn't say it's doing that but it has the effect of doing that, then it's perfectly fine. that's what supreme those supreme court court cases do. and so it allows states power to take create white supremacy and basically force black voters out. black people are voting in the 1860s and 1870s after the supreme court. those those civil rights cases, we see the understanding clauses being and we see the approach poll taxes. and what's the third one poll taxes. understanding clauses and grandfather clauses and the grandfather clause that basically says, okay, maybe you can't read the constitution, baby, you didn't pay your poll tax, but did your grandfather vote? and so there's a there's an exception, a loophole made for white people who don't pay the poll tax or so. yeah. so so the supreme court does

basically weaken the 14th amendment. it's powerful instrument when it's passed in 1866, but it doesn't really come into force in the south in many ways until 1966, 100 years later. but that's that's my take. but of course, my specialty is the period from, you know, the seventies and eighties and the three. i think one consequence of that is scott was describing it is that citizenship for, other groups who don't enjoy the privileges whiteness was also extremely circumscribed. so can you can see the struggle of the 20th century in essence, 20th century expansion of the 14th amendment as an effort not just to compensate for for the extremely restricted notion citizenship as it had developed

in the south but also across the country. so that would apply to hispanic americans, the southwest as well. so there was segregation in california, in the public schools on the basis asian identity, as well as hispanic identity. and that had to be corrected along with white supremacy, the american south. one thing that's not discussed much is the fact that also you can't be on a jury if, you're not a sister. and so that means that juries it's not just that white people are allowed to vote, but but juries are only white then by the 1880s and 1890s. and that's important for understanding the sort of interpretation of crime is that when if you are a white person brought into a jury, you're surrounded by white people, you collectively define what's legal and illegal, what's acceptable, unacceptable based on your understanding the law and the understanding of these cases. and that tends to shape people's around the idea that crime is black. and that order and are white. and so it pulls people into a

kind of white supremacist vision. and and the jury's, i think the fact that juries then are white but black people are not allowed have juries of their own peers is very important for understanding the rise of lynching and these other things because lynching becomes a kind of extralegal justice. but this presumption is that justice is primarily a white phenomenon. well, thank you all so much for joining us. thank you again to our panel fitzhugh brundage, jon sensbach and scott nelson the book is a new history of the american south. i hope that you will read it. i hope that you will get a lot out of it. i know that i did. so thank you very much. and thank you to the audience for being here. atlanta history center tonight and. we will see you all again very soon. i have to give.