Books by "William Kauffman Scarborough"
5 books found
Initially published between 1970 and 2012, the essays in Approaching Civil War and Southern History span almost the entirety of William J. Cooper’s illustrious scholarly career and range widely across a broad spectrum of subjects in Civil War and southern history. Together, they illustrate the broad scope of Cooper’s work. While many essays deal with his well-known interests, such as Jefferson Davis or the secession crisis, others are on lesser-known subjects, such as Civil War artist Edwin Forbes and the writer Daniel R. Hundley. In the new introduction to each chapter, Cooper notes the essay’s origins and purpose, explaining how it fits into his overarching interest in the nineteenth-century political history of the South. Combined and reprinted here for the first time, the ten essays in Approaching Civil War and Southern History reveal why Cooper is recognized today as one of the most influential historians of our time.
Lincoln’s First Crisis concerns five of the most consequential months in American history: December 1860 through April 1861. When Abraham Lincoln swore his oath as president, the United States was disintegrating. Seven states had seceded, and as many as eight seemed poised to join them, depending upon how the new president handled the secession crisis and its flashpoint: Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the heart of the rebellion. The fate of the republic hung in the balance. The Sumter crisis has been hotly debated and deeply researched for more than 150 years. In this thoughtful reassessment, William Bruce Johnson combines thorough research and the latest historiography with a litigator’s methodical analysis and a storyteller’s eye for meaningful detail. Shortly after taking office, Lincoln decided upon a plan to avoid war with the seceded states while keeping his inaugural promise to maintain a Union military presence in the South. Because he chose not to reveal his plan to anyone, rumors soon spread that he was simply afraid to act. One source of such rumors was Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward. Resentful that Lincoln had deprived him of the Republican nomination and convinced that Lincoln lacked the political sophistication necessary to deal with the secession crisis, Seward decided to negotiate with the Confederacy on his own and in secret. General Winfield Scott, meanwhile, the Union’s most senior military officer, had for a decade depended upon Seward for political advice, and now considered himself under orders from Seward, not the president. Johnson traces how Seward and Scott sabotaged Lincoln’s plan. From this account, from his examination of various personalities (such as that of Fort Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson), and from his granular research into aspects of the Order of Battle in Charleston, Johnson has here constructed a new narrative of this crucial period, culminating in a new theory of how and why the Civil War began as it did, and how and why, if the new president’s orders had been properly carried out by Seward and Scott, it might have been averted.
A comprehensive study of secession in all fifteen slave states, Rebels in the Making is a political, social, and economic history of the late antebellum South that examines the appeal of secession to a variety of actors in these states and reveals it to be not a mass democratic movement but a revolution led from above.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, commentators opined that the high concentration of African Americans in dangerous and unsafe work and living environments exposed them to the virus at higher and deadlier rates than their Euro-American counterparts. In From Enslavement to COVID-19, Joe William Trotter Jr. delves into the historical context of this phenomenon. Focusing on four historical periods—enslavement, emancipation, the industrial era, and the digital age—Trotter argues that rather than being anomalous, the fight for adequate health care and beneficial social service policies follows a similar trajectory as the movement of Black people from enslavement to freedom. Trotter emphasizes how the labor requirements of work shaped the African American encounter with disease, how white medical professionals developed stereotypes about the susceptibility of Black people to sickness, and how those professionals denied essential medical care to the country’s most vulnerable. From Enslavement to COVID-19 also highlights how people of African descent drew on their legacy of activism and community-building to improve their physical and mental conditions by creating programs and strategies to combat inequality and discrimination in the nation’s health care system.
Strategies for Survival conveys the experience of bondage through former enslaved people's own words. The source of this landmark content is a remarkable series of interviews conducted in Virginia in 1937 by WPA workers. Most of the interviewers were themselves Black; as a result, the subjects spoke with exceptional candor. William Dusinberre explores these interviews to re-create for the modern reader enslaved people's strategies for survival within the severe constrictions bondage imposed upon their lives. Religion and escape were the chief ways of coping with the indignity of family disruption, contempt, and the harsh realities of slavery. We see great creativity and variety in such responses to oppression, but we are forced to acknowledge the dispiriting realties of enslaved existence and the limits of enslaved people's resistance and agency.