The New South

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt addressed the American Historical Association to call for American history to be written as compelling stories of literary quality. Editor Allen Johnson of Yale University responded by publishing the Chronicles of America series: 50 succinct volumes on regional and thematic American history. These books, intended for secondary schools and college students, are expository works of American history composed by competent historians in the 1920's, well before the special pleading and upending of social norms typical of histories after 1970. This series is focused on the mainstream of American political life and leadership from its initial volumes on Native Americans and European colonists to its final volumes on Woodrow Wilson, Canada, and the Hispanic Republics to our South. Holland Thompson's history of the New South tells the story of the return to home rule after the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Bourbon Democrats and industrial progressives in Dixie. The South's slow adaptation from agriculture to industry was accompanied by the development, at the turn of the century, of Jim Crow segregation laws and the new mill towns that brought textiles and other industries into the South. The book includes an editor's bibliography that takes into account the agrarian movement that opposed the industrial development in the early 20th century and the more recent scholarly literature on the period.