Lessons from History
OSHR-700.37
Professor Neil Heyman
This quarter we will be reading Edward Ayers's The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. Ayers is one of our foremost scholars of the Civil War and the post-war era, and this important and lively work has been described as “the kind of breakthrough book that moves a field onto a new plateau.” Ayers shows the unsettled nature of the South in this period with multiple and often conflicting changes taking place in economics, politics, and race relations. As he puts it, this was a time of “continual redefinition and renegotiation, of unintended and unanticipated consequences, of unresolved tensions."
October 3: Chapters 1 through 4
October 17: Chapters 5 through 8
October 31: Chapters 9 through 11
November 14: Chapters 12 through 14
November 28: Chapter 15, Epilogue, Thoughts
Copies of the book in its 25th-anniversary edition are available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle format. Two copies of the original edition are available in the public library.