The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction
"The Promise of the New South is one of the most widely-read and discussed recent works on southern history....Edwar Ayers has produced an exceptionally elegant and multifaceted portrait of the New South and the wrenching transformations it endured....He has written a rare piece of scholarship that richly rewards each close reading. And I especially congratulate him for encouraging his audience to look afresh at the New South and recognize the fascinating complexities of the age and place."--The Journal of Southwest Georgia History"Thoughtful and colorful....Students of American culture...will find this work rich and satisfying. Ayers conducts a thorough and highly personalized review of regional literature, religion, and racial tensions."--Journal of American Culture"Ayers's The Promise of the New South is the most ambitious, comprehensive, and original survey of post-Reconstruction Southern history to appear since Woodward's Origins....Ayers is in a good position to shed new light on the most notorious activity of the New South years, the ritualistic lynching of blacks....On broader issues of black-white relations...Ayers also has new insights....Read alongside Woodward's Origins, Ayers's book deepens and enriches our sense of the diversity and complexity of southern life and cautions against sweeping generalizations that will not bear close examination in the light of careful empirical research....Many insights into the experiences of people of both races during a challenging and unsettling period."--George M. Fredrickson, The New York Review of Books"Thanks to its extraordinary vitality, Origins of the New South is the monument that towers behind Edward Ayers's Promise of the New South; it is also a monument that Ayers's exciting new book is bound to replace.  Here, at last, is a subtle, compelling view of the late 19th-century South whose scholarship is up-to-date....Ambiguity, surprise, and gender analysis characterize The Promise of the New South, which bristles with unexpected insights....In a synthesis that captures the late 19th-century South in its bewildering complexity, Ayers does get the New South right."--Washington Post Book World"A uniquely comprehensive cultural, political, and social history of post-Reconstruction....Succeeds in depicting the post-Reconstruction South not as a repressed backwater of American life, but as a region that, despite substantial injustices, made significant contributions to American life."--Kirkus Reviews"The 'Promise of the New South' successfully blends historical synthesis and original research to portray a South from 1880 to 1906 that is both newer and more diverse than the one that we have known.  Its author represents a rare combination: a historian who writes eloquently and quantifies convincingly.  His work is the most important overview of the new South since C. Vann Woodward's 'Origins of the New South'."--Glenda E. Gilmore, Queens College"Impressive....A comprehensive overview of an important era, drawing on the best work of many historians."--Publishers Weekly"In the preface to a 1971 edition of a book on this period first published in 1951 I said it was time for someone to write a new synthesis.  After another 20 years Edward Ayers has risen to the challenge admirably and produced this excellent book."--C. Vann Woodward, author of Origins of the New South"Few historians have managed to strike such an effective balance between highly evocative details and a broad view of social and economic development.  Edward Ayers has a marvelous eye and ear for recreating the voices, the landscapes, and the human emotions of the past....This is a book that will long be studied, debated, borrowed from, and imitated. It is a book that will make a significant difference."--David Brion Davis, author of The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture"Stunningly significant and original...a beautifully written narrative of late nineteenth and early twentieth century southern history that ranges from politics to music, from race relations to class relations and provides readers with a brilliant synthesis that will stand in tandem with C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South as indispensable reading for students and scholars and general readers seeking the understand the South."--Harold D. Woodman, Purdue University