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Buddhism in the United States is often viewed in connection with practitioners in the Northeast and on the West Coast, but in fact, it has been spreading and evolving throughout the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. This book argues that region is crucial to understanding American Buddhism. Through the lens of a multidenominational Buddhist temple in Richmond, Virginia, it explores how Buddhists are adapting to life in the conservative evangelical Christian culture of the South, and how traditional Southerners are adjusting to these newer members on the religious landscape. Introducing a host of overlooked characters, including Buddhist circuit riders, modernist Pure Land priests, and pluralistic Buddhists, the author shows how regional specificity manifests itself through such practices as meditation vigils to heal the wounds of the slave trade. He argues that southern Buddhists at once use bodily practices, iconography, and meditation tools to enact distinct sectarian identities even as they enjoy a creative hybridity.

With emancipation, a long battle for equal citizenship began. Bringing together the histories of religion, race, and the South, Elizabeth L. Jemison shows how southerners, black and white, drew on biblical narratives as the basis for very different political imaginaries during and after Reconstruction. Focusing on everyday Protestants in the Mississippi River Valley, Jemison scours their biblical thinking and religious attitudes toward race. She argues that the evangelical groups that dominated this portion of the South shaped contesting visions of black and white rights. Black evangelicals saw the argument for their identities as Christians and as fully endowed citizens supported by their readings of both the Bible and U.S. law. The Bible, as they saw it, prohibited racial hierarchy, and Amendments 13, 14, and 15 advanced equal rights. Countering this, white evangelicals continued to emphasize a hierarchical paternalistic order that, shorn of earlier justifications for placing whites in charge of blacks, now fell into the defense of an increasingly violent white supremacist social order. They defined aspects of Christian identity so as to suppress black equality—even praying, as Jemison documents, for wisdom in how to deny voting rights to blacks. This religious culture has played into remarkably long-lasting patterns of inequality and segregation.

As Wesley C. Hogan sees it, the future of democracy belongs to young people. While today's generation of leaders confronts a daunting array of existential challenges, increasingly it is young people in the United States and around the world who are finding new ways of belonging, collaboration, and survival. That reality forms the backbone of this book, as Hogan documents and assesses young people's interventions in the American fight for democracy and its ideals. Beginning with reflections on the inspiring example of Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, Hogan profiles youth-led organizations and their recent work. Examples include Southerners on New Ground (SONG) in the NAFTA era; Oakland's Ella Baker Center and its fight against the school-to-prison pipeline; the Dreamers who are fighting for immigration reform; the Movement for Black Lives that is demanding a reinvestment in youth of color and an end to police violence against people of color; and the International Indigenous Youth Council, water protectors at Standing Rock who fought to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and protect sovereign control of Indigenous lands. As Hogan reveals, the legacy of Ella Baker and the civil rights movement has often been carried forward by young people at the margins of power and wealth in U.S. society. This book foregrounds their voices and gathers their inventions--not in a comprehensive survey, but as an activist mix tape--with lively, fresh perspectives on the promise of twenty-first-century U.S. democracy.

Louisiana had the Longs, Virginia had the Byrds, Georgia had the Talmadges, and North Carolina had the Scotts. In this history of North Carolina’s most influential political family, Rob Christensen tells the story of the Scotts and how they dominated Tar Heel politics. Three generations of Scotts – W. Kerr Scott, Robert Scott, and Meg Scott Phipps – held statewide office. Despite stereotypes about rural white southerners, the Scotts led a populist and progressive movement strongly supported by rural North Carolinians – the so-called Branchhead Boys, the rural grassroots voters who lived at the heads of tributaries throughout the heat of North Carolina. Though the Scotts held power in various government positions in North Carolina for generations, they were instrumental in their own downfall. From Kerr Scott’s regression into reactionary race politics to Meg Scott Phipps’s corruption trial and subsequent prison sentence, the Scott family lost favor in their home state, their influence dimmed and their legacy in question. Weaving together interviews from dozens of political luminaries and deep archival research, Christensen offers an engaging and definitive historical account of not only the Scott family’s legacy but also how race and populism informed North Carolina politics during the twentieth century.

Historians often assert that Confederate nationalism had its origins in pre-Civil War sectional conflict with the North, reached its apex at the start of the war, and then dropped off quickly after the end of hostilities. This book argues instead that white Southerners did not actually begin to formulate a national identity until it became evident that the Confederacy was destined to fight a lengthy war against the Union. It also demonstrates that an attachment to a symbolic or sentimental Confederacy existed independent of the political Confederacy and was therefore able to persist well after the collapse of the Confederate state. White Southerners redefined symbols and figures of the failed state as emotional touchstones and political rallying points in the struggle to retain local (and racial) control, even as former Confederates took the loyalty oath and applied for pardons in droves. Exploring the creation, maintenance, and transformation of Confederate identity during the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the book sheds light on the ways in which Confederates felt connected to their national creation, and provides an example of what happens when a nation disintegrates and leaves its people behind to forge a new identity.

Two revolutions roiled the rural South after the mid-1960s: the political revolution wrought by the passage of civil rights legislation, and the ongoing economic revolution brought about by increasing agricultural mechanization. Political empowerment for black southerners coincided with the transformation of southern agriculture and the displacement of thousands of former sharecroppers from the land. Focusing on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Greta de Jong analyzes how social justice activists responded to mass unemployment by lobbying political leaders, initiating antipoverty projects, and forming cooperative enterprises that fostered economic and political autonomy, efforts that encountered strong opposition from free market proponents who opposed government action to solve the crisis. Making clear the relationship between the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, this history of rural organizing shows how responses to labor displacement in the South shaped the experiences of other Americans who were affected by mass layoffs in the late twentieth century, shedding light on a debate that continues to reverberate today.

Charleston, South Carolina, was a cosmopolitan city during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Germans, Irish, and a host of European and Latin American immigrants shared the same workplaces, neighborhoods, streets, residences, and even households. Charleston was a slave society, and its economy relied on the forced labor of thousands of slaves. Immigrants also worked as entrepreneurs, skilled artisans, and laborers. Immigrants and African Americans interacted on a daily basis, and their relations were often positive. White southerners found those positive relations threatening, and nativist sentiments prevailed during the 1850s. Slaveholding meant economic and political power, and although some immigrants owned slaves many found it objectionable. The Civil War presented slaveholding immigrants, and those that aspired to it, the opportunity to side with the Confederacy. While many German and Irish immigrants enlisted in the fight to preserve slavery, others avoided the conflict. Following the Civil War, German immigrants that had continued to operate their businesses during the war led efforts to rebuild the city. Reconstruction afforded German and Irish immigrants and African Americans political opportunities previously limited or denied. The majority of European immigrants supported the Democratic Party, the party of white supremacy, and African Americans chose the Republican Party.

In 1861, Americans thought that the war looming on their horizon would be brief. None foresaw that they were embarking on our nation's worst calamity, a four-year bloodbath that cost the lives of more than half a million people. But as this book points out in this stimulating and provocative book, once the dogs of war are unleashed, it is almost impossible to rein them in. This book highlights the delusions that dominated each side's thinking. Lincoln believed that most Southerners loved the Union, and would be dragged unwillingly into secession by the planter class. Jefferson Davis could not quite believe that Northern resolve would survive the first battle. Once the Yankees witnessed Southern determination, he hoped, they would acknowledge Confederate independence. These two leaders, in turn, reflected widely held myths. This book weaves its exploration of these misconceptions into a tense narrative of the months leading up to the war, from the “Great Secession Winter” to a fast-paced account of the Fort Sumter crisis in 1861. This book demonstrates a vast range of major Civil War scholarship, from The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience and ?The Confederate Nation, to definitive biographies of Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart.

This book deals with the inherent violence of race relations in two important countries that remain iconic expressions of white supremacy in the twentieth century. It does not just reconstruct the era of violence, but contrasts the lynch culture of the American South to the bureaucratic culture of violence in South Africa. By contrasting mobs of rope-wielding white Southerners to the gun-toting policemen and administrators who formally defended white supremacy in South Africa, the book employs racial killing as an optic for examining the distinctive logic of the racial state in the two contexts. Combining the historian's eye for detail with the sociologist's search for overarching claims, it explores the systemic connections amongst three substantive areas to explain why contrasting traditions of racial violence took such firm root in the American South and South Africa.