(Part 2) Best us abolition of slavery history books according to redditors

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We found 87 Reddit comments discussing the best us abolition of slavery history books. We ranked the 34 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.

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Top Reddit comments about U.S. Abolition of Slavery History:

u/pyromancer93 · 38 pointsr/BestOfOutrageCulture

I'm actually reading through a book about the Antebellum Period right now called Northern Men with Southern Loyalties. It's a really fascinating and infuriating look at how desperate the soon-to-be-Confederate States were to not just protect, but expand slavery and how the Democratic Party of the time became entirely beholden to their interests.

The Slave owners that ran the South didn't give two shits about "states rights", they wanted to turn the country into a slave nation and expand the institution as far as they could. Between the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the attempts to grab land from Latin America to create more space for slavery, and the Dredd Scott decision, they were willing to use as much power as they could to protect slavery. And that's before we even get to secession.

Those are the people these idiots are supporting when they go on and on about race wars and state's rights and the Civil War.

u/LottoThrowAwayToday · 13 pointsr/menkampf

> They didn't know their fathers back then either, tbh

Not true:

>Despite the horrors of slavery, overall, during the pre-emancipation era, about two-thirds of enslaved families had two parents—far more than today. More recent revisionist work has stressed that, while forced separations were always an important part of the picture, the two-thirds figure remained dominant (Wilma Dunaway is especially handy on this). And this tendency continued into the Jim Crow era, contrary to a false sense one might have of daily life in a black ghetto of the 1930s and ’40s—think Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices or Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. Namely, it is wrong to suppose that, amid the misery of those neighborhoods, all but a sliver of children grew up without a dad. That is a modern phenomenon, whose current extent—fewer than one in three black children are raised by two parents—would shock even the poorest black folk 100 or even 50 years ago.

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Or, as Thomas Sowell puts it:



>If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on "the legacy of slavery" with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.
>
>Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and "war on poverty" programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.
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>Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black "leaders."
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>Ending the Jim Crow laws was a landmark achievement. But, despite the great proliferation of black political and other "leaders" that resulted from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.
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>Nearly a hundred years of the supposed "legacy of slavery" found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent.
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>The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals' law enforcement policies. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a "legacy of slavery" there.

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u/Vampire_Seraphin · 8 pointsr/AskHistorians

Less than 20% of Southerners owned slaves, less than 5% more that 5 IIRC.

David Cecelski wrote an excellent book not long ago called The Waterman's Song about slaves working in maritime industries in North Carolina. They did jobs including fishing, working boats, digging canals, and a few were even captains of small boats working the sounds and canals.

The book is very popular right now, many libraries should have it.

u/brothamo · 6 pointsr/history

> They weren't dependent on their slaves nor did they realize significant gains from owning slaves. Most people who owned slaves did not have many resources

These claims are untrue. Slavery was the source of economic wellbeing for most Southerners, at least all successful ones. You can find many Historians who argue that Slavery under-girdled the Southern way of life, both economically and socially. The South's only real export to the rest of the country was cotton. Cotton output was directly connected with the size of one's slaveholding and how well one controlled the slaves.

> Had production been able to thrive in the south, prices would go up as well as costs decreasing as transportation, the largest cost of a good, was virtually eliminated.

Production did thrive in the South. The Cotton Gin leveled the slaveholding class and allowed any white southern man to produce cotton and sell it to traders going up the Mississippi or to anywhere else in the country. As I stated in my prior post slavery was the path to economic wellbeing. The South had no other valuable exports and thus southerners had no other way to make money besides owning slaves.

> Instead of owning slaves which aren't a really good investment as they require food and they die, the slaveholder class would transition to renting land to sharecroppers.

Slaves were tremendous investments which is why it was very rare for Slaveowners to kill their slaves. Most major landowners in the South acquired their land as a result of the economic wellbeing their slaves afforded them. I don't know much about white sharecropping in the pre civilwar South, but I'd venture to say that it was directly tied to Slavery. That without slaves there would be no one to till the land! Thus the North's requirement that the South get rid of Slavery would be unthinkable.

> Slaves were already taken care of better than factory workers in the north.

That's a very controversial claim. One that I think most historians would contest.

> Cultural differences wouldn't lead to a war on the scale of the civil war

No, but they played a part in it.

> in fact most people in the south, and people in the north would have no interaction and very little knowledge of each others' cultural at all.

Again, this claim is simply untrue. By the mid 1800s with railroads sprouting up across the Midwest, North, and parts of the South the country was becoming very connected and interdependent economically. The shipping lanes from the South to the North were incredibly busy. Also if you read a book like Uncle Toms Cabin it's pretty hard to say that Northerners didn't know much about Southern way of life as Stowe portrayed Slaveholders quite accurately.


I suggest reading a few books on the topic such as The Ruling Race And if you like Historical Fiction, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

I don't know if we disagree much though. The Civil War was fought for economic reasons but those economic reasons were inexorably linked with Slavery and the culture that allowed it to flourish.

u/mhornberger · 5 pointsr/TrueReddit

> Nagel argues that the alt-right has abandoned the religious basis early conservatism is built on. Instead, they deal in wholesale power exchanges with no underlying "truth" to form as the bedrock

Many would argue that the religious basis of conservatism was always just a mask for power. Cobb's Away Down South, Faust's The Ideology of Slavery, Fox-Genovese's The Mind of the Master Class and many other works show how inextricably the religion in the South was bound up in justifying and preserving slavery. George Wallace's opposition to desegregation was also heavily based on his religious convictions. Same for the Klan, both the 19th century and 20th century incarnations.

So whether the alt-right represents a departure from a fundamental aspect of conservatism, vs just the putting aside of a pious facade once it was no longer necessary, is a matter of some contention. There are of course strains of religion that were not about power, but about justice and compassion, but that strain was always picked up by the liberals. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, or even, more currently, the faith of Jimmy Carter.

Edit (added):

Consider who is often offered as more or less the poster-boy for intellectual, dignified conservatism, William F. Buckley. Here is a 1965 debate between Buckley and James Baldwin. It's about an hour in length, but I would challenge anyone to watch it and conclude that Buckley's position was about principle, rather than privilege or power. The alt-right may be more crass and sophomoric at times, but I don't think they represent much that is actually new. They represent new tactics and marketing, but not new values.

u/JMBlake · 5 pointsr/AskHistorians

That wouldn't be a very helpful thing to search in order to find what you are seeking. Compact Theory is a philosophic theory that dates back much longer than the constitutional debate on secession. Compact Theory is merely the idea that government is a contract between the people within a given area to create "The State" and give that entity a monopoly on violence to enforce laws. Searching for that will take you way outside the more narrow debate on secession. I think what you are looking for is a broad overview of both sides of the secession debate within American history.

If you are looking for arguments of the day, try reading some historical works on the subject. I will refer you to:

u/obstacle2 · 3 pointsr/USCivilWar

I have a few suggestions.

One is a book of short stories written by a journalist and veteran of the civil war, Ambrose Bierce. http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Stories-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486280381 It's an excellent piece of fiction and some of the most gripping stories about the war I've ever read. The short stories in this collection draw on ideas about families on opposite ends of the battlefield and what it was like to fight in your own homeland, as well as others.

The second is titled Civil War Hospital Sketches and is written by a volunteer nurse Louisa May Alcott. http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Hospital-Sketches-Louisa-Alcott/dp/0486449009 It is a short book that contains some of her experiences as a nurse during the war.

The book The Union War by Gary Gallagher set out to explain why the North felt so compelled to fight a war. It draws on primary sources like regimental yearbooks and personal letters to understand the motivation of fighting men of the time. The gist of it is, people believed in the idea that American democracy was an exceptional experiment and if the country was allowed to tear itself in two, the experiment and democracy would be a failure. http://www.amazon.com/Union-War-Gary-W-Gallagher/dp/0674066081/

The Confederate Home Guard is an interesting concept I haven't seen represented in anything except the film Cold Mountain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Home_Guard Essentially militias made up of the men who did not/were not able to serve in the Confederate army. The had a significant amount of authority over the civilian population and sometimes dealt harshly with deserters they came across. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Home_Guard

On the Union side, Contraband was the term applied to the newly freed slaves who were either employed by the Union army or who followed the Union army in hope of some kind of assistance. The often set up camps around Union forts and once the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, the families of black soldiers were often located there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraband_(American_Civil_War)

u/brickmaster15 · 2 pointsr/history

Have a look at the work of David Brion Davis, particularly The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. His work explores the cultural shifts in causing rising abolitionist sentiment, using plenty of evidence for his case. Although it is a very academic work, it can be still quite easy to read.
If you are interested in the topic overall then I'd recommend taking a look at Eric Williams' thesis Capitalism and Slavery, as well as criticisms and critiques of his work as it greatly altered the history of abolition (with a particular focus on British abolition).

u/ekwcawaew · 1 pointr/USCivilWar

Two really good books on the topic are, The Gray and the Black and Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807125571/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195315863/ref=rdr_ext_tmb