Sydney Nathans | |
---|---|
Born | May 24, 1940 |
Academic background | |
Education | PhD, 1969, Johns Hopkins University |
Thesis | Daniel Webster and the Whig party 1828-1844. (1969) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Duke University |
Sydney Harold Nathans (born May 24,1940) is an American historian who is a professor emeritus at Duke University and has written several history books including To Free a Family:The Journey of Mary Walker and A Mind to Stay:White Plantation,Black Homeland.
Nathans was born on May 24,1940. [1] By the age of eight,his family (consisting of his merchant father,mother,and sister),had lived in five different states. [2] He was educated at San Jacinto High School in Texas,where he won the 1958 National High School Oratorical Contest. [3]
Upon earning his PhD,Nathans accepted a faculty appointment in Duke University's history department. [2] He published his first book in 1973 titled Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy through the Johns Hopkins University Press. The book focused on the establishment of the political party Whig and one of its founders,Daniel Webster. [4] In 1978,Nathans travelled across Alabama to see if he could locate descendants of enslaved African Americans in order to gain a better understanding of the Great Migration. [2] There,he encountered Alice Hargress,whose story he based his book on titled A Mind to Stay:White Plantation,Black Homeland. Hargress described the migration of 114 black slaves from North Carolina to a 1600-acre plantation in Alabama where they eventually purchased their freedom. [5] [6] He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980 to assist in his research. [7]
In 1984,Nathans edited the University of North Carolina Press and NC Division of Archives and History five-volume series The Way We Lived in North Carolina, which received the American Historical Association's James Harvey Robinson Prize. [8] A few years later,he continued his research into the history of black migration in America by following the story of Mary Walker in Glastonbury,Connecticut. Nathan came into contact with Walker's descendants and wrote her story of escaping slavery in his 2012 book To Free a Family:The Journey of Mary Walker. [9] [10] It would go on to receive the 2013 Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History as "the best book written in English on slavery or abolition." [11]
The Whig Party was a political party that existed in the United States during the mid-19th century. Alongside the slightly larger Democratic Party,it was one of the two major parties in the United States between the late 1830s and the early 1850s as part of the Second Party System. Four presidents were affiliated with the Whig Party for at least part of their terms. Other prominent members of the Whig Party include Henry Clay,Daniel Webster,Rufus Choate,William Seward,John J. Crittenden,and John Quincy Adams. The Whig base of support was centered among entrepreneurs,professionals,planters,social reformers,devout Protestants,and the emerging urban middle class. It had much less backing from poor farmers and unskilled workers.
The Anti-Masonic Party was the earliest third party in the United States. Formally a single-issue party,it strongly opposed Freemasonry in the United States. It was active from the late 1820s,especially in the Northeast,and later attempted to become a major party by expanding its platform to take positions on other issues. It declined quickly after 1832 as most members joined the new Whig Party;it disappeared after 1838.
The 1852 United States presidential election was the 17th quadrennial presidential election,held on Tuesday,November 2,1852. Democrat Franklin Pierce defeated Whig nominee General Winfield Scott. A third party candidate from the Free Soil party,John P. Hale,also ran and came in third place,but got no electoral votes.
William Rufus DeVane King was an American politician and diplomat. He was the 13th vice president of the United States from March 4 until his death in April 1853. Earlier he had served as a U.S. representative from North Carolina and a senator from Alabama. He also served as minister to France under President James K. Polk.
Jacksonian democracy was a 19th-century political philosophy in the United States that expanded suffrage to most white men over the age of 21 and restructured a number of federal institutions. Originating with the seventh U.S. president,Andrew Jackson and his supporters,it became the nation's dominant political worldview for a generation. The term itself was in active use by the 1830s.
The Great Migration,sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration,was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast,Midwest,and West between 1910 and 1970. It was caused primarily by the poor economic conditions for African American people,as well as the prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld. In particular,continued lynchings motivated a portion of the migrants,as African Americans searched for social reprieve. The historic change brought by the migration was amplified because the migrants,for the most part,moved to the then-largest cities in the United States at a time when those cities had a central cultural,social,political,and economic influence over the United States. There,African Americans established influential communities of their own. Despite the loss of leaving their homes in the South,and the barriers faced by the migrants in their new homes,the migration was an act of individual and collective agency,which changed the course of American history,a "declaration of independence" written by their actions.
The Fugitive Slave Act or Fugitive Slave Law was a law passed by the 31st United States Congress on September 18,1850,as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern interests in slavery and Northern Free-Soilers.
Black Belt is a physical geography term referring to a roughly crescent-shaped geological formation of dark fertile soil in the Southern United States. It is about 300 miles (480 km) long and up to 25 miles (40 km) wide in ca. east-west orientation,mostly in central Alabama and northeast Mississippi.
Randall Lee Gibson was an attorney and politician,elected as a member of the House of Representatives and U.S. Senator from Louisiana. He served as a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army. Later he was a regent of the Smithsonian Institution,and a president of the board of administrators of Tulane University.
Gabriel Moore was a Democratic-Republican,later Jacksonian and National Republican politician and fifth governor of the U.S. state of Alabama (1829–1831).
A plantation house is the main house of a plantation,often a substantial farmhouse,which often serves as a symbol for the plantation as a whole. Plantation houses in the Southern United States and in other areas are known as quite grand and expensive architectural works today,though most were more utilitarian,working farmhouses.
The Lillian Smith Book Awards' are an award which honors those authors who,through their outstanding writing about the American South,carry on Lillian Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding. The award is jointly presented by the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries.
The back-to-Africa movement was based on the widespread belief among some European Americans in the 18th and 19th century United States that African Americans would want to return to the continent of Africa. In general,the political movement was an overwhelming failure;very few former slaves wanted to move to Africa. The small number of freed slaves who did settle in Africa—some under duress—initially faced brutal conditions,due to diseases to which they no longer had biological resistance. As the failure became known in the United States in the 1820s,it spawned and energized the radical abolitionist movement. In the 20th century,the Jamaican political activist and black nationalist Marcus Garvey,members of the Rastafari movement,and other African Americans supported the concept,but few actually left the United States.
Peter Hutchins Wood is an American historian and author of Black Majority:Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974). It has been described as one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years. He is a professor at Duke University in North Carolina.
Everhope,known throughout most of its history as the Captain Nathan Carpenter House and more recently as Twin Oaks Plantation,is a historic plantation house near Eutaw,Alabama. Completed in 1853 for Nathan Mullin Carpenter,it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage due to its architectural and historical significance.
Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery,such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
Nathan Bryan Whitfield was a planter,architect and General of the North Carolina Militia.
The Black Belt in the American South refers to the social history,especially concerning slavery and black workers,of the geological region known as the Black Belt. The geology emphasizes the highly fertile black soil. Historically,the black belt economy was based on cotton plantations –along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The valuable land was largely controlled by rich whites,and worked by very poor,primarily black slaves who in many counties constituted a majority of the population. Generally the term is applied to a larger region than that defined by its geology.
Paul C. Cameron (1808–1891) was one of the most wealthy slaveholders in the US state of North Carolina. When his father left him the business in the late 1800s,Cameron oversaw the work of 470 slaves across 12,475 acres of land mostly in North Carolina. However,as he got older he grew his business,buying plantations in both Alabama and Mississippi. By about 1860,he owned 30,000 acres of land and 1,900 slaves. Not only did he grow his slave business,but he also invested in the construction of the North Carolina Railroad,owned a few textile mils,and put in considerable stocks in two separate banks.