Drew A Swanson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780300191165
- eISBN:
- 9780300206814
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300191165.001.0001
- Subject:
- Environmental Science, Nature
This book presents an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant ...
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This book presents an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the book provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters. This book explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. It weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.Less
This book presents an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the book provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters. This book explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. It weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.
Steve Estes
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469622323
- eISBN:
- 9781469624921
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469622323.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter discusses the struggle for racial equality in Charleston. It describes the origins of a local civil rights movement which would culminate in a 1969 hospital workers' strike, one of the ...
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This chapter discusses the struggle for racial equality in Charleston. It describes the origins of a local civil rights movement which would culminate in a 1969 hospital workers' strike, one of the last major direct action campaigns of the civil rights era. The Charleston movement and the hospital strike is contextualized in the larger conflict against paternalistic racism. The idea of paternalism goes back to the Roman era, when the pater familias was the head of the household and estate owner. Though the term has come to mean a domineering father figure, it was once applied simply to upstanding Roman citizens who owned property. The Roman pater familias had a responsibility to protect his dependents—wife, children, and slaves—but he also had the power of life and death over them. In the antebellum South, southern planters cultivated a paternalistic relationship with their slaves based on this Roman model.Less
This chapter discusses the struggle for racial equality in Charleston. It describes the origins of a local civil rights movement which would culminate in a 1969 hospital workers' strike, one of the last major direct action campaigns of the civil rights era. The Charleston movement and the hospital strike is contextualized in the larger conflict against paternalistic racism. The idea of paternalism goes back to the Roman era, when the pater familias was the head of the household and estate owner. Though the term has come to mean a domineering father figure, it was once applied simply to upstanding Roman citizens who owned property. The Roman pater familias had a responsibility to protect his dependents—wife, children, and slaves—but he also had the power of life and death over them. In the antebellum South, southern planters cultivated a paternalistic relationship with their slaves based on this Roman model.
