Like cotton, indigo has defied its humble origins. Left alone it might have been a regional plant with minimal reach, a localized way of dyeing textiles, paper, and other goods with a bit of blue. ...But when blue became the most popular color for the textiles that Britain turned out in large quantities in the eighteenth century, the South Carolina indigo that colored most of this cloth became a major component in transatlantic commodity chains. In Red, White, and Black Make Blue, Andrea Feeser tells the stories of all the peoples who made indigo a key part of the colonial South Carolina experience as she explores indigo's relationships to land use, slave labor, textile production and use, sartorial expression, and fortune building. In the eighteenth century, indigo played a central role in the development of South Carolina. The popularity of the color blue among the upper and lower classes ensured a high demand for indigo, and the climate in the region proved sound for its cultivation. Cheap labor by slaves-both black and Native American-made commoditization of indigo possible. And due to land grabs by colonists from the enslaved or expelled indigenous peoples, the expansion into the backcountry made plenty of land available on which to cultivate the crop. Feeser recounts specific histories-uncovered for the first time during her research-of how the Native Americans and African slaves made the success of indigo in South Carolina possible. She also emphasizes the material culture around particular objects, including maps, prints, paintings, and clothing. Red, White, and Black Make Blue is a fraught and compelling history of both exploitation and empowerment, revealing the legacy of a modest plant with an outsized impact.
This book provides a new conceptual framework for understanding how the Indian nations of the early American South emerged from the ruins of a precolonial, Mississippian world. A broad regional ...synthesis that ranges over much of the Eastern Woodlands, its focus is on the Indians of the Carolina Piedmont - the Catawbas and their neighbors - from 1400 to 1725. Using an 'eventful' approach to social change, Robin Beck argues that the collapse of the Mississippian world was fundamentally a transformation of political economy, from one built on maize to one of guns, slaves and hides. The story takes us from first encounters through the rise of the Indian slave trade and the scourge of disease to the wars that shook the American South in the early 1700s. Yet the book's focus remains on the Catawbas, drawing on their experiences in a violent, unstable landscape to develop a comparative perspective on structural continuity and change.
Shepherd McKinley presents the first-ever book on the role of phosphates in economic, social, and industrial changes in the South Carolina plantation economy. Fueling the rapid growth of low-country ...fertilizer companies, phosphate mining provided elite plantation owners a way to stem losses from emancipation. At the same time, mining created an autonomous alternative to sharecropping, enabling freedpeople to extract housing and labor concessions. Using extensive research, McKinley shows how the convergence of the phosphate and fertilizer industries carried long-term impacts for America and the South.
Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold develops an overarching view of what can be considered one of many key factors in the birth of southern industry. This top-down, bottom-up history (business, labor, social, and economic) analyzes an alternative path for all peoples in the post-emancipation South.
In mapping the slow decline of the rice kingdom across the half-century following the Civil War, James H. Tuten offers a provocative new vision of the forces—agricultural, environmental, economic, ...cultural, and climatic—stacked against planters, laborers, and millers struggling to perpetuate their once- lucrative industry through the challenging postbellum years and into the hardscrabble twentieth century. Concentrating his study on the vast rice plantations of the Heyward, Middleton, and Elliott families of South Carolina, Tuten narrates the ways in which rice producers—both the former grandees of the antebellum period and their newly freed slaves—sought to revive rice production. Both groups had much invested in the economic recovery of rice culture during Reconstruction and the beginning decades of the twentieth century. Despite all disadvantages, rice planting retained a perceived cultural mystique that led many to struggle with its farming long after the profits withered away. Planters tried a host of innovations, including labor contracts with former slaves, experiments in mechanization, consolidation of rice fields, and marketing cooperatives in their efforts to rekindle profits, but these attempts were thwarted by the insurmountable challenges of the postwar economy and a series of hurricanes that destroyed crops and the infrastructure necessary to sustain planting. Taken together, these obstacles ultimately sounded the death knell for the rice kingdom. The study opens with an overview of the history of rice culture in South Carolina through the Reconstruction era and then focuses on the industry's manifestations and decline from 1877 to 1930. Tuten offers a close study of changes in agricultural techniques and tools during the period and demonstrates how adaptive and progressive rice planters became despite their conservative reputations. He also explores the cultural history of rice both as a foodway and a symbol of wealth in the lowcountry, used on currency and bedposts. Tuten concludes with a thorough treatment of the lasting legacy of rice culture, especially in terms of the environment, the continuation of rice foodways and iconography, and the role of rice and rice plantations in the modern tourism industry.
How is the state produced? In what ways did enslaved African Americans shape modern governing practices? Ryan A. Quintana provocatively answers these questions by focusing on the everyday production ...of South Carolina's state space-its roads and canals, borders and boundaries, public buildings and military fortifications. Beginning in the early eighteenth century and moving through the post-War of 1812 internal improvements boom, Quintana highlights the surprising ways enslaved men and women sat at the center of South Carolina's earliest political development, materially producing the state's infrastructure and early governing practices, while also challenging and reshaping both through their day-to-day movements, from the mundane to the rebellious. Focusing on slaves' lives and labors, Quintana illuminates how black South Carolinians not only created the early state but also established their own extralegal economic sites, social and cultural havens, and independent communities along South Carolina's roads, rivers, and canals.Combining social history, the study of American politics, and critical geography, Quintana reframes our ideas of early American political development, illuminates the material production of space, and reveals the central role of slaves' daily movements (for their owners and themselves) to the development of the modern state.
African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry examines perceptions of the natural world revealed by the religious ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina ...from the colonial period into the twentieth century. Focusing on Kongo nature spirits known as the simbi, Ras Michael Brown describes the essential role religion played in key historical processes, such as establishing new communities and incorporating American forms of Christianity into an African-based spirituality. This book illuminates how people of African descent engaged the spiritual landscape of the Lowcountry through their subsistence practices, religious experiences and political discourse.
Sustainability of the natural environment and of our society has become one of the most urgent challenges facing modern Americans. Communities across the country are seeking a viable pattern of ...growth that promotes prosperity, protects the environment, and preserves the distinctive quality of life of their regions. The coastal zone of South Carolina is one of the most endangered, culturally complex regions in the state and perhaps in all of the American South. A Delicate Balance examines how a multilayered culture of environmental conservation and sustainable development has emerged in the lowcountry of South Carolina. Angela C. Halfacre, a political scientist, describes how sprawl shock, natural disaster, climate change, and other factors spawned and sustain—but also threaten and hinder—the culture of conservation. Since Hurricane Hugo in 1989, the coastal region of South Carolina has experienced unprecedented increases in residential and commercial development. A Delicate Balance uses interdisciplinary literature and ethnographic, historical, and spatial methods to show how growing numbers of lowcountry residents, bolstered by substantial political, corporate, and media support, have sought to maintain the region's distinctive sense of place as well as its fragile ecology. The diverse social and cultural threads forming the fabric of the lowcountry conservation culture include those who make their living from the land, such as African American basket makers and multigenerational famers, as well as those who own, manage, and develop the land and homeowner association members. Evolving perceptions, policies, and practices that characterize community priorities and help to achieve the ultimate goal of sustainability are highlighted here. As Halfacre demonstrates, maintaining the quality of the environment while accommodating residential, commercial, and industrial growth is a balancing act replete with compromises. This book documents the origins, goals, programs, leaders, tactics, and effectiveness of a conservation culture. A Delicate Balance deftly illustrates that a resilient culture of conservation that wields growing influence in the lowcountry has become an important regional model for conservation efforts across the nation. A Delicate Balance also includes a foreword by journalist Cynthia Barnett, author of Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis and Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.
London’s “Carolina traders," a little-known group of transatlantic merchants, played a pivotal but historically neglected role in the rise of tensions in the South Carolina lowcountry. In Trade, ...Politics, and Revolution, Huw David delves into the lives of these men and explores their influence on commerce and politics in the years before and after the American Revolution. Beginning in the 1730s, a few select merchants in Charleston fueled South Carolina’s economic rise, used their political connections to prosper in British-Carolinian trade, and then relocated to London, becoming absentee owners of property, plantations, and slaves. Using correspondence, business and slave trade records, newspapers, and a wealth of other sources, David reconstructs the lives of these Carolina traders and demonstrates their shifting but instrumental influence over the course of the eighteenth century. Until the 1760s these transatlantic traders served as a stabilizing force, using their wealth and political connections to lobby for colonial interests. As the British Empire flexed its power and incited rebellion with laws such as the so-called Intolerable Acts, South Carolinians became suspicious of the traders, believing them to be instruments of imperial oppression. Trade, Politics, and Revolution offers a fresh understanding of trade in South Carolina’s early history and the shifting climate that led to the American Revolution, as well as reaching beyond the war to explore the reconstruction of trade routes between the newly founded United States and Great Britain. By focusing on one segment of transatlantic trade, David provides a new interpretive approach to imperialism and exposes the complex, deeply personal rift that divided the Carolina traders from their homeland and broke the colonies from the mother country
Civil War Canon Brown, Thomas J
2015, 2015-02-17, 2016-01-21
eBook
In this expansive history of South Carolina's commemoration of the Civil War era, Thomas J. Brown uses the lens of place to examine the ways that landmarks of Confederate memory have helped white ...southerners negotiate their shifting political, social, and economic positions. By looking at prominent sites such as Fort Sumter, Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery, and the South Carolina statehouse, Brown reveals a dynamic pattern of contestation and change. He highlights transformations of gender norms and establishes a fresh perspective on race in Civil War remembrance by emphasizing the fluidity of racial identity within the politics of white supremacy. Despite the conservative ideology that connects these sites, Brown argues that the Confederate canon of memory has adapted to address varied challenges of modernity from the war's end to the present, when enthusiasts turn to fantasy to renew a faded myth while children of the civil rights era look for a usable Confederate past. In surveying a rich, controversial, and sometimes even comical cultural landscape, Brown illuminates the workings of collective memory sustained by engagement with the particularity of place.
On Sunday, September 9, 1739, twenty Kongolese slaves armed themselves by breaking into a storehouse near the Stono River south of Charleston, South Carolina. They killed twenty-three white ...colonists, joined forces with other slaves, and marched toward Spanish Florida. There they expected to find freedom. One report claims the rebels were overheard shouting, "Liberty!" Before the day ended, however, the rebellion was crushed, and afterwards many surviving rebels were executed. South Carolina rapidly responded with a comprehensive slave code. The Negro Act reinforced white power through laws meant to control the ability of slaves to communicate and congregate. It was an important model for many slaveholding colonies and states, and its tenets greatly inhibited African American access to the public sphere for years to come.
The Stono Rebellion serves as a touchstone forCalling Out Liberty, an exploration of human rights in early America. Expanding upon historical analyses of this rebellion, Jack Shuler suggests a relationship between the Stono rebels and human rights discourse in early American literature. Though human rights scholars and policy makers usually offer the European Enlightenment as the source of contemporary ideas about human rights, this book repositions the sources of these important and often challenged American ideals.
