ABOUT THIS BOOK

Elites have shaped southern life and communities, argues the distinguished historian Willard Gatewood. These essays—written by Gatewood's colleagues and former students in his honor—explore the influence of particular elites in the South from the American Revolution to the Little Rock integration crisis. They discuss not only the power of elites to shape the experiences of the ordinary people, but the tensions and negotiations between elites in a particular locale, whether those elites were white or black, urban or rural, or male or female. Subjects include the particular kinds of power available to black elites in Savannah, Georgia, during the American Revolution; the transformation of a southern secessionist into an anti-slavery activist during the Civil War; a Tenessee "aristocrat of color" active in politics from Reconstruction to World War II; middle-class Southern women, both black and white, in the New Deal and the Little Rock integration crisis; and the different brands of paternalism in Arkansas plantations during the Jacksonian and Jim Crow eras and in the postwar Georgia carpet industry.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Randy Finley is an associate professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. He is the author of From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom: The Freedmen's Bureau in Arkansas, 1865—1869, which won a commendation from the American Association for State and Local History. Thomas A. DeBlack is an associate projessor of history at Arkansas Tech University and the author of Arkansas in the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Histories of Arkansas series. James C. Cobb is the B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of the History of the American South at the University of Georgia. He is the author of many books, including Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South and The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. He was president of the Southern Historical Association in 1999. Willard B. Gatewood's published works span political, intellectual, social, cultural, economic, military, ethnic, and even environmental history. His focus on the impact of the elite in history began with his first published monograph about a North Carolina educator, Eugene Clyde Brooks, and culminated in Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880—1920, first published by Indiana University Press in 1991 and reprinted by the University of Arkansas Press in 2000.

TABLE OF CONTENTS






Introduction
Randy Finley and Thomas A. DeBlack                           ix

Publications by Willard B. Gatewood Jr.                      xvii

In the Shadow of the Revolution: Savannah's First Generation of
  Free African American Elite in the New Republic, 1790-1830
  Whittington B. Johnson                                    1

"A Model Man of Chicot County": Lycurgus Johnson and
  Social Change
  Thomas A. DeBlack                                             16

"I Go To Set the Captives Free": The Activism of Richard Harvey
  Cain, Nationalist Churchman and Reconstruction-Era Leader
  Bernard E. Powers Jr.                                        34

"This Dreadful Whirlpool" of Civil War: Edward W Gantt and
  the Quest for Distinction
  Randy Finley                                                 53

James Carroll Napier (1845-1940): From Plantation to the City
  Bobby L. Lovett                                              73

Robert E. Lee Wilson and the Making of a Post-Civil War Plantation
  Jeannie M. Whayne                                             95




Reward for Party Service: Emily Newell Blair and Political
  Patronage in the New Deal
  Virginia Laas                                                 118

"A Generous and Exemplary Womanhood": Hattie Rutherford
  Watson and NYA Camp Bethune in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, 1937
  Fon Gordon                                                    133

Tufted Titans: Dalton, Georgia's Carpet Elite
  Thomas Deaton                                                 143

Sara Alderman Murphy and the Little Rock Panel of American
  Women: A Prescription to Heal the Wounds of the Little Rock School Crisis
  Paula C. Barnes                                               164

Notes                                                         177
List of Contributors                                          219

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.