then at eight p.m. texas women's university history professor cecily sander talks about the control of the american west from the 1800s to the civil war. at 9:30 p.m. on the presidency, former polis present marking the 103rd team anniversary of ronald reagan's birth. also at 10:30 p.m. history on historic campaign speeches, first a 2008 campaign speech by democratic residential candidate hillary clinton at a rally at california state university owned by 2016 super tuesday speech by republican presidential candidate and florida senator marco rubio in miami. exploring the american story. watch american history tv saturdays on c-span 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime

at c-span.org/history. tting heh three great >> good evening and welcome to the atlanta history center. unclear family vice president of the history center. i'm here tonight with three great scholars and i'm very excited to have here at the atlanta history center tonight. fitzhugh brundage and scotty nelson. many contributors to this new volume, a new history of the american south. it just came out a couple weeks ago so we are very excited to be here in discussion with them tonight. each are professors of history. each have different areas of expertise so we have a lot of ground to cover tonight. and i will briefly introduce them and then we will jump in and fix is on the end and the editor of this wonderful bun. is a professor of history at the university of north carolina at chapel hill.

so, welcome from north carolina. appreciate you being here. sitting next to his john who teaches in american history at the university of florida and drove up from gainesville to join us. we are grateful to you for being here tonight. welcome. and lastly on end have scott nelson who is the georgia athletic substation professor of history at the university of georgia. drove over from athens today. thank you for being with us today. >> thank you so much. >> this book covers a lot of ground. it goes back several thousand years actually and takes us up to the present. it truly is a comprehensive history of the south but with so many contributors and so much ground to cover and that we would start with the basic questions to the editor and that is how did this project initially come about? >> it came about when an editor from the university of north carolina press came to me two decades ago and suggested that

it was time to have a new interpreted history of the american south. and i was keen to do it but life intervened and it took longer than i would have expected. but part of the challenge was we wanted to pool together a team of really great scholars who i hope they won't be offended, we wanted sort of mid- to late midcareer scholars. but it took us so long to bring the book out that we are little further in our careers now. >> in theory. >> in any case the goal was to get people who have fresh things to say about the south and not just fresh things said about the south but to get the walk authors to work together collaboratively. so the book is an ensemble effort as opposed to single authors writing whole chapters.

and i'll say that makes it a little more challenging to write the book because you have to start with the early authors so john was one of the earliest contributors not only in the period that in the actual writing of it and then we worked our way to the 20th century. so leaving that together was a conscious goal of the volume from the outset. and i think that's what distinguishes it for example from some of the other works and the single author or multi- volume single off three author histories of the south. >> i want to touch on the concept of the south quick before we move into more content specific things. new history of the american south. but as i said it goes back to many, many years before the concept of a united states would have existed. and in the introduction to the

book, you give some guidance about what this book is not in the things it is not framed around one of the things that someone born and raised in the south may be legal as you said this book is not looking at the south through this lens of southern distinctiveness because we think we are so different or so special but also not looking at the sellthrough different lenses as well. how did you for purposes of this volume, how did you define the south and the place and time period? what led you in that direction? >> well, with regards to time period, this book focuses on the history of the region from before european contact but largely through the era of the emergence of a euro american civilization in what we call the south. so what we do go back hundreds

and hundreds of thousands of years in some instances, the focus is really we will say 1500 to the present admittedly. but in thinking about that we didn't want to start with the assumption that the history of the region was the history of europeans in the region. so we also didn't want to start with the assumption that there was one moment in time when somehow the south became the identifiable thing that we call the south. so it may sound complicated but the way we worked was actress so to think. we all think of the south a properly because it's the way we calmly talk about the south, as essentially the states that were part of the confederacy and maybe some people throughout kentucky inn and oklahoma in and there are good reasons to do that. so we accept that. that's the vernacular used in the south but we wanted to look at the history of that territory throughout the entire span of the time as opposed to starting let's say at jamestown

or saint augustine and then tracing european settlement out from that. the reason why that is and portland is the south looks very different in 1500 or 1600 to 1700 or 1800, for that matter, if you're paying attention to all the people who live in what we now think of as the south. as opposed to just essentially euro americans. it makes a much more cosmopolitan south. >> and john, in your chapter, indians, africans and europeans are the early celso taking us from that foundation about naming what was the south did so your work delves into when the south and the area we now know as the south, became popular besides the native inhabitants of the region. so you talk a lot about how the

people from three different continents came together in a relatively not super large area of land for the first time for a lot of them. can you talk up out the early history of that initial contact and how the relationships between white settlers, native americans, enslaved africans brought over from africa, how those things started out and how they changed over the course of the period you are writing about. there is quite a stark difference between where you start your work and where you end it. >> the larger question to get back to what fitts was saying was how do we find the south. and the earlier centuries that i was writing about, historians like myself who write about that period have a conundrum like how can you write about this region that became the south before it was the south. nobody in the years 1710 said i really like living in the

south. so during that period from let's say 1700 to the middle of the 18th century saw profound demographic changes where in the year 1600, essentially, the entire population would have been indigenous people and native americans. by the time that spanish and english and eventually the french begin settling, small pockets of colonization in florida and louisiana and virginia and the carolinas, and then begin bringing in enslaved africans, you see a profound transition where because of disease, warfare, slave training and indigenous population begins to decline where they go from 100% in the population in the year 1600 then essentially by 1750, they are down to about 20% of the population. and the european and african

populations have risen dramatically by that point. paradoxically most of the south what we now call the south, was still in native hands. so west of the appalachian mountains this was still native territory. this was still dominated by indigenous people even though the populations have begun to decline dramatically. so what you then see toward the period of the american revolution and into the 19th century was euro americans enslaved people beginning to push further further south and west and displacing indigenous people even more. this period of 150-200 years involves tremendous changes in population and culture and economics. >> did that look different in different colonies depending on which european country was settling them. i think sometimes in the u.s. we have a tendency to talk about early american history and we forget about florida for

some reason. the spanish that are there and we tend to talk about the british colonies. did you see any trends or differences between the spanish, french, british and what that looked like? >> sure, of course and that's when things we tried to emphasize is the fact that you had all these different colonial projects going on with the french and louisiana so you can have a catholic zone of settlement along the gulf coast from louisiana through spanish florida. and then when you go north and confront the carolinas then that's settled by the english. there's a religious tension built in. catholic, protestant and the wars of religion that started in europe leaped the atlantic and come to the americas. and that is very much a product of that. with corresponding changes and differences in the way the societies are structured, a

higher degree of incorporation of african-americans and indigenous people in the catholic societies than in protestant british colonies for example. >> so one of the other frames of the book that's laid out at the beginning is that the south is a region that sees a lot of people for very many years. this is not just unique to the south but certainly a defining feature. so the third author we have a us tonight, scott, you talk about jumping forward a couple hundred years. stay with me. your essay focuses on the aftermath of the civil war. so we are starting out talking about the conception of the south and people moving in and forming what we now know as that territory. and then in many ways after the civil war, you have a situation where 40% of the southern population, give or take, went from being considered property in the eyes of the law to be

coming citizens. some of them, the men in that case being considered for at least a time of voting. so you would have massive demographic shift and the shift in the conception of who gets to be a southerner and who gets to participate in society. so your essay is entitled the bourbon south. first of all i wonder if you could enlighten us on the title. and then you start out with a lot of atlanta history. so given our audience to tonight i thought that might be fun to dig into. >> sold the bourbons arc immediately after the war you have black and white settlers moving into the south of southern homestead act. lots of black families getting land and buying land. we see a tremendous number of people growing cotton for the first time who had never grown cotton before. and the bourbons are the ones who the story about the bourbons in france is that they

never forget -- what's expression. that they never learn and never forget. and so the bourbons of the people who come in and try to retake the south and make it a white enclave and rich white southerners are ruling the roost. so they are called the bourbons by their credits by the populace and others because they want to remember again and again with the south was before the war and what the south was during the civil war. so that obsession with kind of -- and dressing up as confederate generals and dressing up as old self plans, all this memorialization when you try to re-create some imagined south. and ironically the south is actually being brought together for the first time after the war. the southern states actually are more committed by railroads

because there was so much supported by this southern states individually that they prevent the states from joining interpret north carolina didn't want to going to south korea. south carolina didn't want any traffic going to georgia. it's only when the confederacy comes in that you seek a continuous railroad that goes to atlanta. atlanta is not a place really of any importance until the confederacy brings bridges. atlanta to richmond and largely to feed the confederacy. and then you start to see a self that goes all the way to texas. you start to see this convergence. the particular thing about that is the environmental catastrophe that then follows when you bring the railroads through when you start to see yellow fever and all these other diseases that had previously been just coastal and spreading throughout. you see scurvy and a lot of other diseases that are uniquely southern that have to do with all the cheap food that starts coming in by railroad

into the south and that cheap food doesn't have ripple slaying and vitamin c and iron. so lots of white and black people eating food that is not especially good for them. so you see this slowness and all these diseases and all these other things. so the south is kind of i would argue, becomes something in this period. there's really a kind of self. but one that at least for people like henry grady in atlanta, it's about remembering a kind of south in which the moonlight and magnolias kind of story. henry grady with the atlanta journal-constitution puts together as bourbon as a way of excluding black people. he comes up to the supreme court and comes up with this way of preventing black people from voting not explicitly but implicitly and that is the kind of story of the south and the bourbon south is the arrival of

the urban transit into atlanta which you still see in the statehouse and the urban triumvirate insurers that by march it will only be white people voting and white people only on juries. we see the rise of lynching and that's when we see all the other ills that distinctively are part of the south. >> building off of that and taking into some of the mechanics of that more and this question is open to anyone. can you talk about -- use meant in the spring court specifically paid there are some things that are georgia and atlantic specific. go into that. >> sold most of the cotton grown in the south you need to hundred frost free days to grow cotton so it's the deep south that grows cotton. after the war when the roads come through the only way you can get credit is from all the banks are destroyed by the war. but confederates come in and take all the gold out of the balls in their giving

confederate bonds and after the war is over then the bonds are valueless. the only way to get credit is to grow cotton and that means people who are up around here in the hills never grown cotton in the 1830s is suddenly grown cotton because it's the only thing you and get cash and credit for. so country stores and other things and you think about cracker barrel. the think of it as an old- fashioned thing but the cracker barrel was the cutting edge of the south in the 1860s and 70s. it was the institution that gave you credit for growing cotton that provided you the food you needed and provided all of these things. so a lot of distinctively southern are very much new things. and atlanta becomes the hub for the southern railway of consolidating one well right run by radicals that joins us altogether. most of the cotton into going out of virginia rather than through georgia. so georgia becomes a kind of

colony anyway. it's relationship to the u.s. economy changes pretty drastically as well. >> i think it's interesting when you mentioned henry grady and the magnolias conception but then you also think about what he was known for which is the phrase, the new south. so, explain. you go back to the past but then something new. >> so he gave a speech at the union league around 1880 or 1881. is that right? and he says we walk into the south and the south is thrilling with new capital and imagines himself as a woman. we start to see the south as a female character. the south needs capital and the south is thrilling with investment. and in fact what he is offering women. he's offering lots and lots of white women who have lost husbands or fathers during the

civil war so there is a very large of white men that are wiped out by the war as well but a lot that are wiped out by the war itself. so there's a lot of unattached women. atlanta is a city of women. black and white women and these will be the hands that work in the cotton mills. so rather than just growing cotton, we also will see industrialization and urbanization. and industrialization and urbanization and south is not actually what we see here it's not these 20 story buildings. it's taking cotton interning into cloth. it's taking timber and turning into furniture produce taking tobacco and turning it into cigarettes. if taking the raw materials and going one step up and that is what the south is. so when we talk about industrialization and urbanization like in atlanta then we are about taking raw materials and doing one more thing with them.

>> absolutely. i want to go back a little bit before the civil war because i want to touch on of what you left off with, john. we skipped a large time period. during this time there was a shift in the way that enslaved africans and african-americans and white people relating to one another. i don't want to leave this out but the native american piece. you talked about how the population was rapidly declining due to disease and war and other factors. but as a definition in the south expanse you include like oklahoma with is a large native american population. can you talk about while all this is going on, simultaneously, what do we see going on in the lead up to the civil war with the native american piece because that becomes important after the civil war too. >> it said during the 18th

century, most of the south even though the preponderance of the population was steadily becoming more and more european and african and indigenous population was declining, even after the american revolution well into the 19th century, most of the south was still claimed by native people and still occupied there. what you see from the. essentially when the constitution is signed in 1788 and up until the 1st to 3 decades of the 19th century is that an increasing pressure of driven largely by the federal government as well as speculators and privateers to acquire native land and dispossessed native people from their homeland. and so what you see gradually under especially under andrew jackson is the sense that

native people for their own good need to be removed to make way for white settlers and for the expansion of cotton that scott is talking about. so the indian removal act probably best known as the indian disposition act, gets signed in 1830 and the federal government is committed to moving indigenous people. so from georgia and from florida and from the carolinas, from arkansas. being moved west and relocating oklahoma. so when fitts says there's good reason to say all come as part of the extent south, that's one big reason why that would be the case. >> i will piggy back on that with one observation. we tend to think about it violent disposition of native

americans especially in the west and all the tradition of western movies and the violence it depicts of the u.s. cavalrymen versus indians. it's worth remembering the bloodiest war against american indians was fought in florida. the seminole wars which go as there are three of them. the violent occupation of florida is very much a part of the story of the emergence of what we now call the modern south. and through this whole book, one of the themes that you all talk about and all the other stuff but the work is this idea of expanding of the concept of who gets to be considered southern in this case. whose history will be included in this book is very, very different than whose history would have been included in this book 50 years ago. so i would like to hear from all of you and the scholarship as well so this work and

obviously a reflection of many other things that you all have been working on for quite some time. can you talk about how that definition of southern has gotten expanded and kind of where you see that potentially going forward. >> i certainly think the definition has been utterly transformed over the last half- century. and it's not just i will call it no pun intended and a study of the early south and when i was in graduate school the center of corneal scholarship was still new england and the mid atlantic. there was wonderful scholarship on the chesapeake bay but that was really the kind of southern extension. and so there was a particular focus on early american history that excluded large parts of the south in addition, we think about that it's not really until the 1970s that there

starts to be a large body of scholarship on women. black women. vintages and women and white women in the americas south. southerners has just exploded in depth. we know so much more about slavery than we did just 50 years ago. i think it is not just that the definition of southerners has changed but the richness with which we can talk about all of the people whom we now call southerners has transformed over the last 50 years. >> what we think of as southern, so many of those things, understanding the african roots. we talk about the religious traditions and stuff like that that comes out of new orleans. you talk about jazz, i talked about blues. talking about cooking and its relationship to african traditions of food and feeding

oneself. understanding that part of the south means that a lot of the things that we think that are interesting and beautiful about the self actually come from the african part of the south. and that tradition, the way in which that was spoken of before, where we get our actions from. it used to be told that somehow there was this english tradition that carried on in the chesapeake and we understand that it's an african -- melding of african and european traditions that make much of the language that we talk about. also music has the african- american roots, native american roots. it is a richer south. it is the south that we actually admire. the south that we actually like, much of it is we need to see this, the bringing together of all these rich and

complicated and struggling cultural traditions. >> can i just jumping? thinking on food, i like to tell my undergraduates i ask where is progressive? where did the food company start? it's a new orleans company started by sicilians. new orleans has the second- largest sicilian population in the united states. ask them what's the most soon -- famous and richly associate with new orleans? it's much more recent. again, it is sicilian influence being embraced in this incredibly interesting cosmopolitan city. >> i would say that the cultural and demographic diversity is really a function of the early periods of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries one the south was a place of incredible immigration, a destination for immigrants from the british isles, from

germany, from switzerland, france, you know, pain, as well as dozens and dozens of enslaved people from africa speaking many languages, practicing different religions, and encountering indigenous people likewise speaking many languages and practicing their traditions. to me, that's when we think about southern distinctiveness and a sense of southern meat nest, perhaps. this collision of all these cultures in the 18th century was probably unprecedented, i think in recent history. that contributes to all the kinds of gumbo that our scholars are talking about. >> the way in which the south used to be taught was jefferson, jackson, the political elite. to me, everything that is interesting about the south comes from the hillbilly

hideout, the slave quarter. the places that are actually separated from that kind of elite southern traditions. telling the story of that south is interesting and fascinating to people. >> one other thing that i think is important for us to remember about the south. when i was being introduced to the history of the south, always heard about the southern sense of place. i don't deny that southerners have a deep sense of place, but so do vermont, french quebec, lots of people have a place. one of the things i think this writing about southerners as we think of rootedness. yet, southerners have been incredibly -- i'm in this by african-american, by indigenous peoples, they've been incredibly migratory people. and so for example in the antebellum era, some of the

most mobile americans according to the census were virginians, who were migrating out of virginia in numbers larger than out of new england. so that those southerners, whether they would be coerced or they are moving by choice, were populating the mississippi river valley. they are all moving all the time, they're moving into louisiana, moving into the mississippi delta. it's a very mobile population in this region that we tend to think of as being very sedentary. that's because when i think about southerners who stayed behind, we forget about those southerners who were migrating to texas, bakersfield, california, or chicago, detroit, or pittsburgh. so it is a mobile people adjusting to generational upheaval after generational upheaval. >> we were talking earlier

about how scholarship on southern history in the former decades tended to focus on specific groups of people and histories. now the history that we have and have a test to, we are continuing to study is much more rich and inclusive of lots of different types of people. i did want to ask about sources, because i think that can sometimes be a little confusing to people. if it's history that happened, how can it be new history? i wonder if each of you study different aspects of southern history. it's interesting to know how that process has changed over the years and research about where you find the stuff you read about. >> there is henry grady. everyone has heard about editor of the constitution. luckily for me as a scholar, it was another henry gray was a

railway carpenter. unc bought a sight unseen massive collection of a white railroad workers letters to his sister because they thought he was that henry gray. and it was fantastic for me. the only downside is that he wrote on brown paper with a purple crayon because that is y what he used for measuring wood with. his spelling was atrocious, really awful. but henry a grady is horrified by the south. he builds the south, these railroad bridges with others. he is a carpenter and eventually becomes a so construction foreman. when he goes to louisiana, mississippi. he says it's so strange, pick alert, swampy and ugly. i don't want to be in the south. meanwhile, henry w. gray talks about how the south is one thing a new south and it's the future.

so sometimes the archive will lead you to people. henry a grady, a railroad carpenter, working-class guy. one closest to the black railroad workers who talk about the kind of work environments that they are in and the kinds i of track laying that they do so the archive is always ready for a new kind of his eerie, i think. >> i would say that question is particularly acute for my period where people, the authors in my team writing about the pre-19th century south , particularly writing about indigenous americans and african-americans ouwhere many the sources, most of the sources, are actually written by europeans. so the question is how can you study these people if they did not leave their own sources? this is a question that has given historians lots of

thought over the past decades. they've made pretty good strides in recent years, trying to limit what sources do exist to try to uncover as best they can the thoughts and invoices, the sense of personality that is revealed. when written by european sources. it's a tricky thing. it is not easy to do. but that is the question. especially with indigenous history. you know, a tool that is essential for people running about native american history. you work with what sources you can and maybe try to make it as layered and textured as possible, given that it is not always easy to do. >> i will use an example that goes back to when i first came to atlanta. i wrote my dissertation about

reaching -- in virginia and georgia. when i did my research, you hadh to use newspapers and microfilm. so i read 50 years of the atlantic constitution, reading the first two pages and the fourth page, the editorial page, for 50 years. those of you who have not worked and microfilm may not appreciate what that was. it affected my eyesight, act truly. i had to wear glasses for a few years. and the scholarship has been transformed over the last 30 years. particularly in the last few years. i will throw one example. the great southern historian woodward voted his entire purpose of scholarship, less than four pages in all of his scholarship to the topic of

lynching. no one would write a comparable study of the length of his book and devote so little space to it. one of the reasons why it is he was not -- he wasn't a newspaper researcher to begin with. but the research took me literally a year and a half to do for my dissertation, you can now do in -- you could do it in milliseconds. but then you would have to read all the stories on newspapers.com or the atlanta constitution.com. in other words, to be able to do the research to track down lynching evidence is infinitesimally easier now than it was just 30 years ago. and so we know immensely more about not just lynching, but also about attempted lynchings, which were incredibly hard to track down previously. that would be an instance where

the knowledge, so to speak, was there, inert, but technology has made it possible to get to it so much more easily than we could have 10 years ago or 30 years ago. >> one other reason, a source that i use is folklore and black music. the story of john henry is something i've written a book about. all of these track minor songs that were collected in the 19 teens and 20s and go from the 1880s to the 19 teens. 100,000 of them in the american- style in 1900. those songs are by people who -- if they were alive in 1880, it was illegal for them to read in 1860. hearing their voices is very, very hard. that's why folklore and folk songs, many which become blues

songs, are a source which we can use and discover tremendous material from. >> we are going to move to audience questions here in just a minute. be thinking about the great westerns that i know you will have for our panel tonight really want to take it to each of you. you teach undergraduates and graduates. you are around a lot of young people. you also write books that people who are not historians and who are not students actually want to read, so thank you. it's very well written. lots to dig into there. the book obviously started as you noted earlier many years ago but it came out during a very interesting time. i think we always live in interesting times, but i will call it an interesting time and an interesting moment for history right now because there

is a lot in the news every day. disagreements over his history gets to be taught, how it gets to be taught, why it is important or not important to teach and what some of this stuff actually means. i'm wondering how you encounter that in your classrooms as i'm sure you do every day versus when you get to get out a little bit and talk with folks who are not currently students. how have these conversations in the public sphere shaped, or not, the scholarship? >> you know, that is a very, very rich question. it's also a moving target because, for example, north carolina, there is legislation before the state legislature right at this moment that will transform the way k-12 students in the state learn history. i guess what i would say is two things. we are in a world in which ap u.s. history influences enormously what anybody in high

school in the united states learns about american history now. and yet on the other hand, we now have increasing politicization of what we've learned or what is taught in schools. i actually am rarely optimist deck that we -- those of us committed to the study of history and the teaching of history, i like to say we have the facts on our side. and so, if we have to engage in debates about the past, i think we are in pretty good position to hold our own. and i don't say that with pollyanna. but if people want us to talk about, teach about the history of free-market capitalism in the united dates, bring it on. let's start talking about slavery and how it fit into

free-market capitalism. let's talk about railroads and the funding of railroads and what that meant as you uf described for people who used it to be self-sufficient farmers but then had to enter into the marketplace in order to get access to funding. in my own way, i think it will be french warfare, to use a military metaphor. it will be a long, arduous struggle but i think the facts are still on our side. >> i would say since i teach in florida, a state which has seen some politicization of the curriculum in the past year or so, this is a question that we think about all the time. i will give you one example, which is that -- i just finished teaching a course on the american revolution. those of you who may have been following the diversity about the extent 19 project which came out a few years ago one of the contentions of the 1619

project was the preservation of slavery was a driving inspiration for the american revolution itself. while the claim wasn't new, it's been made by many historians long before the 1619 project came along. it somehow resonated with the o public and became very controversial. we talked about that in our class and just try to get students to weigh the evidence. and to what extent, if any, was slavery a part of the rationale for the revolution itself. we look at the evidence and the evidence is pretty rare that it was not the only rationale, but it was a rationale for the declaration of independence. and students, you know, i had to make them aware of the controversy. this is the way in which un historians operate. from using evidence, looking at arguments, counterarguments, try to come to your own best

conclusions. if we could do that as a society to take these controversial things. what is so wrong about inking about this? what role does estate actually having dictating what can and can't be taught in a classroom? we have to counter those things with an honest look at the history based on evidence. that's what we do. that's what my students did. they concluded that slavery was part of the american revolution. >> i will go this orthogonally. i like the question about teaching and writing. to me, teaching is exciting. i teach the big u.s. survey. branded students. the students who did not get a s 5 on the ap exam. they got the 3 and 4. they are not history majors. it will never be history majors. they will be dragged kicking and screaming and history. i love that. they cannot graduate from you ga without having a u.s.

history course. so i say look, take a class, get a job and the job is going to be closely related to the course you are taking. agricultural, economics or fashion design. onomics or you will get into that job and you will hate your life and drink yourself to death. or you can think about where you fit in the long past of the american history. how do you fit and how did other people cope with the world around them? how did they confront the problems of their generation and how will you do it? i want to save you from alcoholism. i want to save you from that world. let's talk about american history. so we can't understand american history, the colonization without drugs or they are all drugs. coffee, sugar, tobacco, cocoa. basically it's a drug world.

thinking about the american south, a world of drugs being shipped back to europeans. i think trying to get their attention, the intention of an e engineering into would rather be anywhere else, would rather be stuck in traffic then the in an american history class. when you get them excited and get them to turn their head andl think differently about it, i think my job is done. there is a feedback loop where when you teach and you get students excited and interested you can go, that's actually a good story. i need to write that down. i need to tell that story. to me, that is the exciting thing about history as a riding discipline. it can grow out of a good class. often really good, sharp and the skeptical questions from students that often push me and asked what's the financial revolution have to do with colonization of the new world? you're not going to -- now

going to go back and look at it and think out of it a little bit more. there is something exciting about skeptical's and it teaching skeptical students and learning how to tell a story that works. then going back to the sources, of course. we're all historians. we can't adjust tell a good story. we have to have the sources that are on our side. i think so much of this book is like that. these are some of the best gems that we have kept. our classes that we've decided to present. so your story about the great london fire. how it's a really important precursor to the coming of slavery in the south. the transition to slavery in the virginia colonies has a lot to do with the london fire of 1666. that's fascinating. it makes you think twice and

the book is filled with observations and nuggets like that that are just fantastic. >> i agree. it's never a bad thing to push everyone to show their work and show their sources, right? it's those questions coming in better opportunities, right, to talk about things that we maybe have not talked about collectively before. we want to hear from you now. we are sure there are lots of questions. please raise your hand sanitizer so we can see you and we will come to you. >> how important were slave narratives in african-american oral history in your research and the outcome? >> i will start off just k briefly. i think particularly martha jones chapter and kate mazer's

chapter, chapters that deal with the early republic. 1022 1860, the slave narratives definitely are important, as well as particularly martha jones is interested in how we will call them now black southerners are seeing themselves as residents of the region and as americans and members of the black diaspora. an african diaspora. their voices very important. take her chapter. she uses a kind of organizing figure. so there definitely a very important for us. >> the narratives written in 1933, collected during the depression, are great matches for the period of slavery but

after slavery. if you want to talk about black life in the 1870s or 1880s, thurston is one of the people w collecting these materials her description of the kind of intimacy out of the narratives is fantastic. what impact did the great >> what impact did the great migration have on the economy, the demographics of the south, to people trying to move to chicago, new york, especially employers from their employees tried to move away to those urban areas? >> the great migration is not in my period. this is later. but it's very important. it is critical to understand what makes migration possible.

how the warfare makes it impossible for employers of detroit and chicago to get a stream of european workers. and so we see them bringing black newspapers from detroit and chicago down to the south to show people about the opportunities that are available. there is a massive migration that changes the north. in important ways. and what it changes about the south is equally important. there is a kind of continuous movement of people going back and forth from the chip and circuit, a cultural tradition. much of what we think of as the blues comes out of that tradition. and we see a lot of the most horrific violence that comes in

the period after. formally, we talk about lynching is being 1877 to 1914. but it is the red summer of 1919 that sees tremendous violence against black people in many parts of the south. in fact, just wrote about red summer, so it's fresh in my mind. we see the destruction of important black cities, black and where black people are thriving. that is discussed in the 20th century. it's out of my field, out of my period, but it's a great deal of talking about that in particular. >> there were definitely efforts to stop it. here in georgia, there were efforts to stop trains from living savannah and elsewhere. but there's the classic example of the way american federalism and capitalism work.

they were recruiting agents to come down from northern industrial centers, recruiting blacks to migrate north. and so there are just as there are people trying to keep them in the south. white landowners, white employers, there are also white employers and that north moving heaven and earth to get them to come north for it so there were subsidies to migrate. et cetera. they are countervailing forces, in a way. then, of, black: the south, many of them are very eager to get out. and so they found their way. i'm interested your comments on the way in which white supremacy and >> am interested in your comment and the way in which white supremacy and -- in the south created distortions in

constitutional law and the legal structure, not only in the, and whether you think those distortions persist today and another form. >> yeah. wow. some of these are constitutional and some of them aren't. one thing that occurs to me is that there were things called -- in 1866. when andrew johnson is president, he brings in -- basically allows southern states to reconstruct themselves with just white voters. they create a bunch of laws that make it illegal to be black in the city. you have to have papers and things like that the 14th amendment is an attempt. military reconstruction, radical reconstruction is an attempt to prevent that from

happening. to say okay, the states -- congress says these are not states anymore but territories. military governors. they will have to do this to be brought back to the states. i would argue that the black coat never went away. that formally said black people cannot enter into marriages or testify against white people. those were stricken from the institution but there are other things like very high fees. relatively low amount -- if you take something that's worth last and -- anything more than $10 is a felony in 1866. in virginia. the bar was $30 in virginia before the war. and there is an attempt to identify things that are associated -- basically associated with black men and women to take those things from misdemeanors and jenna menta felonies. the 14th amendment, there are

attempts after for the states to get around the 14th amendment. the way they did that constitutionally with supreme court cases -- sorry, the civil rights cases. those basically say as long as the state does not say it is designed to exclude black people, it's okay. so the 14th amendment still holds. everyone is a citizen. you cannot deny citizenship based on race, color or previous condition of servitude british the state passes a law and does not say it is doing that it has the effect of doing that, it's perfectly fine. that's what those cases did. so it allowed states tremendous power to take and create white supremacy and basically force black voters out. black people are voting in the 1860s and 1870s after the civil rights cases. we see the understanding clauses being brought.

we see the poll taxes and what is the third one? all taxes, understanding causes and grandfather clauses. the grandfather clause basically says okay, maybe you can read the constitution. maybe you did not get the tax but did your grandfather vote? so there is an exception made for why they don't pay the tax. the supreme court basically does weaken the 14th amendment. it is a powerful instrument when it is passed in 1866 but it does not really come into force in the south in many ways until 19 six 26, 100 years later. that's my take. of course, my specialty is the period from the '70s and '80s. >> i think one consequence of that as scott was describing it

is citizenship for other groups who don't enjoy the privileges of work is was also extremely circumscribed. so you can see the struggle of the 20th century in the 20th century expansion of the 14th amendment as an effort not just to compensate for the extremely restrict the notion of citizenship that had developed in the south but also across the country. so that would apply to hispanic americans in the southwest, as well. so there was segregation in california public schools on the basis of vision identity as well as hispanic identity. that had to be corrected along with what the primacy in the american south. >> one thing not discussed much is also you cannot be on a jury. it's not just that people are allowed to vote that juries are only white men by the 1880s and

1890s. it is very important for understanding the interpretation of crime is that when you are a white person brought into a jury, surrounded by white people, you collectively define what is legal and acceptable or unacceptable based on your understanding of the law and these cases. at times to shape people's minds around the idea that this harms black people in that order and why are white. so it pulls you into the white supremacist vision. and the juries, the fact that the juries then are white, but black people are not allowed to have juries for their peers. very important for understanding the rise of lynching and other things. it becomes a form of extralegal justice because the presumption is that justice is primarily a white phenomenon. >> thank you all so much for dryness. thank you to our panel, johnson and scott nelson. i hope that you will read it.

i hope that you will get a lot out of it. i know i did. thank you very much and thank you to the audience for being here at atlanta history center here tonight and we hope to see you all again soon.