Industrial North Research Articles

Relocating Mimesis: New Horizons for the British Regional Novel

Relocating Mimesis:New Horizons for the British Regional Novel David James (bio) British regional fiction saw its "golden age" with the Brontës' fascination with the remote moorlands of York, an age that witnessed George Eliot's inquest into the spread of industrialization across the Midlands, and Hardy's estranged yet reflexive attachment both to rural Dorset and a romanticized Oxford. Under the aegis of such writers, the provincial novel, as a genre, entered a volatile arena where selfhood and community destabilized one another under the gathering storm of technological modernity. Such was the "golden age" of regional writing, according to Phyllis Bentley. Yet Bentley's canvass is broader than her favoured line-up of practitioners might suggest. Stretching from 1840–1940, it also takes in what she saw as the capacious "renaissance" of regional writing between the world wars. In the 1930s, a time of "fresh impetus" unprecedented for the novel's orientation toward international upheaval, such figures as Winifred Holtby and Storm Jameson wrote of the socio-economic deprivation and working-class unemployment in Yorkshire—a discrete period of innovation that affected setting as much as style (Bentley 13). By heralding new sociogeographical ventures in terms of location and plot, interwar women writers were interested not simply in directing the genre toward immediate polemical concerns, but also in mining a seam quite distinct from their predecessors. To novelists in the heyday of late-Victorian regionalism, the very idea of westerliness, of journeying out of Wessex, consolidated the [End Page 420] equation of seclusion with civility epitomized by Devon and Cornwell—an equation at the heart of these counties' perceived immunity from the urbanization afflicting England's southeast corner.1 As though countering the way southwestern counties had become idealized as enclaves for vestigial traditions, writers at the latter end of Bentley's spectrum in the 1930s would invert that trajectory: northward they lead us, voyaging past the fortunes of East Anglian agriculture as recorded by Doreen Wallace in the 1936 So Long to Learn; past Walter Greenwood's impoverished Lancashire Cotton mills, and beyond—they convey us to where, "under the hammer-blow of adversity," industrial depression had caused a whole population to become "very conscious," as Bentley describes it, "of the common human occupation on which we all depended, which linked us to our native soil" (Bentley 37–8). So conscious were they of the forces that "linked" regional writers to the upheavals of their "native soil," that by the 1970s British social historians were frequently turning back to novelists of the industrial north as spokespersons for provincial hardship. Citied in empirical research into economic fluctuations, reduced to talking-heads for demographic patterns, apprehended against the backcloth of mining and manufacturing towns at a time when indigenous coal and steel industries were coming under increasing threat—regional realists doubtlessly sounded prophetic of the latter-day sea-changes to working-class livelihoods wrought by the upsurge of Britain's free-market economy. Writers following the generational impulses of "Angry Young Men" (as diverse as Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, and Alan Sillitoe), were hailed retrospectively as social documentarians, prescient of a new and virulently divisive era of urban capitalism. As D. J. Taylor remarks, this strategy was "convenient" for sociologists—insofar as regional fiction offered a sort of affective archive, a literary plight symptomatic of the need to raise public awareness of the effects of industrial poverty—yet "highly injurious to the writers themselves" (26). Despite the specificity of their respective polemical and stylistic concerns, northern regionalists from the 1950s and 60s found themselves "turned into a movement whether they liked it or not" (Taylor 26). From Stanley Middleton and Alan Sillitoe in Nottingham, further north still to David Storey's This Sporting Life (1960) and Stan Barstow's A Raging Calm (1968), their achievements became variously misrepresented as "dramatized sociology" (26). [End Page 421] One key metacritical lesson emerges from this use of realist literature as merely an adjunctive resource for historical revisionism. Realism's narratological evolution has meant many things for writers committed to projecting alternative conditions for provincial life, writers who capitalize upon the hybridity of mimetic narration as a distinctive manner of addressing social forces...

From Slavery to Incarceration: Social Forces Affecting the Epidemiology of Sexually Transmitted Diseases in the Rural South

The high rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the southeastern United States have been shaped by historic and contemporary social forces. More than other regions of the country, the South was defined by slavery, an extremely hierarchical relationship between whites and blacks. Emancipation left much of the racial hierarchy intact with whites as farm owners and blacks as hired workers or sharecroppers. Agricultural policies that favored mechanization caused blacks to leave farm work and move into segregated towns, leading to the advent of the rural ghetto. Post-World War II mass migration, mostly by young men, to the industrial north altered the sex ratio and social capital of the southern towns left behind. The cocaine epidemic of the 1990s, followed by the high incarceration rates of the "War on Drugs," disproportionately affected low-income blacks. Each of these forces led to sexual and care-seeking behaviors that favor transmission of STDs.

The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities (review)

Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities. By William G. Thomas and Edward L. Ayers. http:// www.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/. Produced by Virginia Center for Digital History at University of Virginia.The Differences Slavery Made is a digital information source that demonstrates how scholars have begun to take advantage of World Wide Web. authors, University of Virginia history professors William G. Thomas and Edward L. Ayers, describe their Web site as a single file of nearly 24,000 lines of text, not dozens of individual web pages with embedded links to each (Introduction: Presentation). It was composed at Virginia Center for Digital History, and like any online article was published as a collection of hyperlinked documents with branching connections and layers of detail made possible by use of electronic media. It is divided into seven major sections: introduction, summary, analysis, methods, evidence, historiography, and tools.Thomas and Ayers examine relationship between mid-nineteenthcentury American and emerging forms of modernity: nationstate, economic development, participatory democracy, and individual autonomy. They question whether negotiation of these sociopolitical influences produced new tensions that gave rise to crisis of 18601861 and conclude that Civil War did not simply result from struggle over modernization. The war was result of highly mobilized and highly confident regions, each modern in its own way, fighting over future of in a rapidly expanding United States (Introduction: Overview).The differences made for white people were pervasive and structural, part of an ongoing process, not outcome of struggle between modernity and slavery. Slavery was vitally connected to modern progress. But as Thomas and Ayers point out, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have shown all too clearly that forms of modern life can be adapted to forced labor and racial domination. American South pioneered in this fusion (Summary of Argument: Conclusion). Slavery and modernity coalesced as parts of same process.Thomas and Ayers reached these conclusions after comparing counties close to Mason-Dixon Line, one in which was legal, other in which it was not, which together offer a test of slavery's influence in antebellum era. South is represented by Augusta County, Virginia, and North by Franklin County, Pennsylvania, two places which shared virtually everything except slavery (Summary of Argument: Debates). similarities between these communities provide conditions needed for something like a controlled experiment: if culture, politics, and economy of Augusta County were affected by slavery, then its influence must have been even greater farther south; and if culture, politics, and economy of Franklin County were largely unaffected by slavery, then its influence must have been even smaller farther north (Introduction: Overview). A test of this hypothesis revealed that these communities showed significant differences in demography, strategies, and development but broad commonalities in economic outlook, political structures, and cultural orientation (Introduction: Overview). Thomas and Ayers conclude thatslavery drove all conflict that brought on Civil War but not in a simple way based on modernity, not in way many imply when they speak of economics causing war or of industrial North against agricultural South. . . . [Sjlavery was more central to Civil War than we have thought because it exerted a determining influence. . . . Slavery adopted forms of modern life available in mid-nineteenth-century United States-capitalist forms of investment and economic motivation, advanced transportation and communication, politics of broad participation by white men, and general white prosperity. …

The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century

The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century. By M.F. SNAPE (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2003; pp. 228. N.p.). THIS is a significant and well-researched book which makes a timely intervention in the debate about the success or failure of the Church of England in the eighteenth century. Against those (including this reviewer) who have argued that the Anglican Church in the Georgian period was pastorally more successful and more adept in retaining popular affection than its nineteenth-century detractors claimed, Snape uses the parish of Whalley (at 161 square miles, reputedly the largest in England) to highlight instead the Church's weaknesses and failures. In so doing he makes the case that, whatever may have been true of the south of England, the Church was ineffective in the industrial north. Snape's choice of Whalley is shrewd, since a decade ago Mark Smith, in a pioneering study of Oldham and Saddleworth (parishes not that far from Whalley), argued that the Church had fared far better in industrialising Lancashire than had hitherto been assumed. Smith pointed, for instance, to the creation of chapels of ease as an indicator of the vitality of the Church and its ability to reach out to new centres of population. But Snape cautions against giving too positive a spin on the role of chapels of ease, noting that, in Whalley at least, there were still large tracts of the population not within comfortable reach of a chapel, and that in any case not all chapels were able to provide the full range of services, so that, for the crucial rites of passage, even parishioners living near a chapel had to go elsewhere for the most important services. Snape also sheds doubt on the idea that lay interest in providing funds for chapel building was motivated by altruism in providing accommodation for the poor; rather, he argues, the well-to-do contributors were more concerned to get good seats for themselves. What is particularly suggestive about Snape's analysis is that he can admit that several of the indices which historians have recently used to indicate the vitality of the Church—such as the regular and dedicated provision of Sunday services and the frequent celebration of Holy Communion—occurred in the industrialising north. Indeed, on this score, Whalley's one parish church and seventeen chapels often outstripped their southern counterparts, generally offering two services on a Sunday where many southern parishes provided just one, and having a monthly communion. But Snape argues that this kind of success nevertheless must be seen within a general picture of overall pastoral decline. While acknowledging the provision of Sunday services, he points out that, by the 1770s, clergy were frequently noting that the poor stayed away from church, sometimes using the excuse that would become more common in the Victorian period that they did not have a ‘Sunday best’. Most tellingly, however, Snape's case for the failure of Anglicanism in the industrial north goes beyond the conventional sociological explanations for what went wrong. Rather than seeing the Church's collapse as the result of simply being overwhelmed by the growth of population, urbanisation and industrialisation—explanations which proved popular among social and ecclesiastical historians in the 1970s—Snape lays the blame for the failure of Anglicanism squarely at the door of the Church itself. The Church's weaknesses, he can acknowledge, were no doubt exacerbated by industrialisation, but he is clear they would have occurred without it. At heart, the Church's problems came from within.

The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861

With a fresh take on social dynamics in the antebellum South, Jonathan Daniel Wells contests the popular idea that the Old South was a region of essentially two classes (planters and slaves) until after the Civil War. He argues that, in fact, the region had a burgeoning white middle class - including merchants, doctors, and teachers - that had a profound impact on southern culture, the debate over slavery, and the coming of the Civil War. Wells shows that the growth of the periodical press after 1820 helped build a cultural bridge between the North and the South, and the emerging southern middle class seized upon northern middle-class ideas about gender roles and reform, politics, and the virtues of modernization. Even as it sought to emulate northern progress, however, the southern middle class never abandoned its attachment to slavery. By the 1850s, Wells argues, the prospect of industrial slavery in the South threatened northern capital and labor, causing sectional relations to shift from cooperative to competitive. Rather than simply pitting a backward, slave-labor, agrarian South against a progressive, free-labor, industrial North, Wells argues that the Civil War reflected a more complex interplay of economic and cultural values.

Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren

A joycean tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren . . . stake[s] a better claim than anything else in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass's Omensetter's Luck and Nabokov's Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.—The Libertarian Review (blurb taken from the recent Vintage edition.) This reviewer has missed the point. Or, rather, this reviewer has missed one point of many in his reduction of Dhalgren to a national monument. To be fair, this reduction is the essence of the work of a traditional book review and of much intellectual work. While I do agree that Dhalgren is an "enduring monument of our national literature," I question the absence of scare quotes in the review. In the world of Dhalgren (and some would say, our world) adjectives—like "permanent" and "enduring"—and nouns—like "monument" and "nation"—can only be written under erasure. There is another reading of Delany's novel, a reading which interrupts any simple reduction to a patriotic monument, work of art, or tool of ego creation. Situating Dhalgren, published in 1975, in the context of the 1960's and early 1970's is difficult to resist. Indeed, Delany has admitted that the [End Page 172] "ruins and wrecks" of U.S. cities provided him with his essential material (Edelman). We also know from the same interview that Delany originally envisioned the novel as a series of five novels in which five dissimilar governments would be overthrown by a "group of people just exercising the wonderful world view of the flower children." For African-Americans, the 1960's and 1970's were a period of extreme poverty and racism, as well as a period of great change with so many migrating from the rural south to the industrial north (Zinn 458–459). During this period there were peaceful civil right marches, militant Black Panther actions, anti-war protests, prison riots, and assassinations. Exercising little hyperbole, Howard Zinn describes blacks as "engaging in wild insurrection in a hundred northern cities" in the late 1960's (450). Dhalgren's Bellona, named after the Roman goddess of war, feels like a city torn apart by a race riot, if not a coup d'état. All of which implies that while Delany's original conception altered significantly, his critique of extant political structures remains. Readers of Dhalgren in 1975 would have been incapable of understanding Bellona as anything other than a near analogue of cities recently torn asunder by urban riots. What follows, then, needs to be understood as involving an ethical critique of concrete political structures and as not simply concerned with the writing of the text before us because, as I will argue, the city along with every subjectival creation is a product of myth. Delany's text interrogates such monumental myths through a representation of the city (and thereby, the subject) as wounded and open to certain ethical possibilities. In its fragmentation Delany's text represents, internally and externally, subjectivity at its limit, which is to say, a "subjectivity" whose assimilative powers have been overwhelmed by the experience of the death of the other, exposing it to community. However, I read Dhalgren first as a way of thinking about how writing can mitigate against the monumentalism of the subject and the subject's myths that obsess after non-relation, eliding that birth or (communal) relation that comes from the outside and others. Dhalgren becomes above all a "novel" which plays at birth, at never getting beyond birth, always coming and never arriving at presence, and, hence, always remaining with others. Bellona defies description. Indeed, this city seems lost even to perception, "Very few suspect the existence of the city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge [End Page 173] and perception to pass it by. Rumor says...

The wages and employment of female day‐labourers in English agriculture, 1740–18501

Using a new sample of farm accounts from 84 farms throughout England, this article provides measures of regional variation and changes over time in female wages and employment in agriculture. Female wages were not fixed, but changed over time and responded to high demand for female labour. The female‐male wage ratio fell between 1750 and 1850, except in the industrial north west. In 1851 approximately 19 per cent of agricultural day‐labourers were female. In the industrial north west, opportunities for factory employment reduced the supply of females to agriculture, but elsewhere the relative demand for female labour in agriculture declined.

Crisis in Cancún

In opulent surroundings, representatives of the World Trade Organi zation's (WTO) 146 member states met 10-14 September 2003 in Canc?n to discuss in the so-called development round? officially the Doha Development Agenda?named after the meeting that launched the negotiations. The task at hand was difficult: to relieve the deadlock plaguing the trade agenda and in so doing agree to conces sions designed to address the development concerns of the Global South, while placating the North's desire to begin negotiations on multi lateral agreements on investment, government procurement, trade facil itation, and competition policy (the so-called Singapore issues). The fault line was agriculture, a notoriously awkward area. All of the usual players were in town: legions of trade officials from the industrial North; significantly fewer representatives from the more numerous countries of the South; protestors; nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); the press; organizing committee officials; onlookers; and heavy security consisting of armed police, co-opted personnel and, most for midably, three Mexican warships. The draft declaration produced prior to the meeting failed to pro vide the basis on which negotiation and agreement could ensue. The production of a second draft declaration midway through the ministerial proved little better. The meeting finally collapsed when conference chair Mexican foreign minister Luis Ernesto Derbez called a close to proceedings. In spite of a rather ironic ministerial declaration that con siderable progress has been made in Canc?n, little hope exists that the round will be concluded by its 1 January 2005 deadline. Amid all the grandstanding, commentary, protests, proposals for ways forward, suggestions for institutional reform, and calls for dis banding the WTO that inevitably accompany and follow such a meeting (especially one that collapses), a deeper and potentially more trouble some problem has been passed over. The problem arises from the answer to one simple question: What if the differences over agriculture and the so-called Singapore issues are resolved, an agreement is reached,

Her Refusal to Be Recast(e): Annie Burton's Narrative of Resistance

I Annie L. Burton's 1909 autobiography, Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days, is postbellum slave autobiography of an ordinary black woman, who refuses be re-enslaved in either word or in deed. In her simply written narrative, she offers extraordinary resistance emerging racial caste system of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction America. While her text begins with reminiscences about her childhood in chattel bondage, at heart of her work is power struggle between black women domestic workers and their white female employers. The story of her voyage from slavery in Clayton, Alabama, domestic work in industrial North, and finally business-ownership in Jacksonville, Florida, charts powerful economic and social forces that attempted re-inscribe a system of slavery onto first generation of nominally freed African Americans. Burton's refusal participate in this reinstatement of her slave condition challenged pervasive image of black woman as mammy, that is, faithful, obedient domestic servant. Burton's Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days details not only one woman's quest from slavery physical freedom but also her journey from a proscribed role creation of her own free identity. As a document of resistance, Burton's narrative begins strangely. In her chapter titled Recollections of a Happy Life, she writes, the memory of my care-free childhood days on plantation, with my little white and black companions, is often with me (3). Burton recalls that both black and white children were entirely ignorant of their positions as racialized subjects, neither knowing nor caring what things were going on in great outside their realm (3). These initial happy memories strike a dissonant chord, as generally most painful aspects of bondage are detailed at beginning of a slave narrative. Burton, simply and powerfully, chooses juxtapose these happier memories with details of hunger and nakedness she experiences as a child during slavery days, in contrast her well-kept and well-fed white companions (4-5). She recalls being whipped for eating more than her allotment of food (4), and she remembers slave women sold for their failure produce offspring (5). Burton gives a detailed account of lynching of a slave who was wrongly accused of murder of his overseer (5). She acknowledges that her own father was a white planter who never noticed ... or in any way acknowledged her as his child (8). So while it is initially discomforting that Burton writes about some of her happy, memories of slavery, reader is clear that Burton suffers no illusion as utter brutality of this peculiar institution. The contrast of Burton's happy childhood days with these bitter and brutal realities of slavery speaks desire within her autobiography reconcile a brutal past and yet maintain hope--and sanity--for a future. (1) And it is uncertainty of that future that Burton gives voice in her narrative. Born into slavery, and a young girl during Civil War, Burton was witness a world being turned upside down; for once, slave owners were living and acting in fear. She sees her slave master leaving unceremoniously for woods and remaining concealed there for five days when Union troops arrive in Alabama. She writes with delicious irony: the niggers had away whenever they got a chance, but now it was master's and other white folks' turn run (9). She describes freedom as a righteous blow to owners of plantations and slaves, especially as their children would feel it more than they, for they had been reared be waited upon by willing or unwilling slaves (39). Yet despite system of slavery being turned upside down in front of Annie Burton's eyes, fundamental ideas about blackness, proper role for black people in America, and functions and duties of black women were not changing. …

‘Living on a woman’: Zum Verständnis der Geschlechterrollen in sozialkritischer Literatur der Zwischenkriegszeit

This article examines conflicts of gender relations during the interwar period in Britain. It centres on a discussion of Walter Greenwood’s successful novel Love on the Dole (1933) as a representative case study of working-class coping strategies in the face of unemployment and dearth. While the interwar period has sometimes ambiguously been named The Age of Illusion, even The Long Week-end, the 1930s with their consistently high unemployment rates in the industrial north have been termed Devil’s Decade, Pink Thirties, or, quite plainly, The Hungry Thirties. Gender relations could not remain unaffected by these constraints on everyday life: Whereas it had been a commonly shared view in the working classes that the husband had to be the bread-winner and the wife’s place was at home, these established gender roles could no longer be taken for granted. Increasingly, they were reversed: Men who lost their jobs stayed at home, while their wives went out to work to support the family. As a result, notions of gender identity, self-respect, and morality had to be redefined. British re-armament and the outbreak of the Second World War created a fundamentally different prospect by mobilizing the entire workforce of men and women alike. The resulting full employment provided a precondition for Labour’s postwar welfare state, which brought with it a return to traditional gender roles by the 1950s

Radiating a Hope: Mary Cardwell Dawson as Educator and Activist

Mary Cardwell Dawson spent her adult life as an activist. (1) From 1926 until her death in 1962 her goal in every endeavor was to provide professional experiences for classically trained African American performers. She accomplished this goal in a number of ways, most of which were based in her fundamental belief that knowledge of the arts, particularly opera, and the performance of those arts by African Americans was an essential element in the culture of her people. She spent her life as a performer, educator, manager, promoter, and impresario, providing countless performers opportunities that would otherwise have been beyond their reach. Many contemporaries praised her efforts while other disparaged them, but it is undisputed that her efforts impacted the local African American arts communities in Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York. Mary Lucinda Cardwell was born in 1896 in Madison, North Carolina, the second of six children. Her family consisted of farmers, but several of them decided to move to the industrial north. Family stories speak of trouble in the town, but the nature of the trouble, whether generalized within the community or localized within the family, remains unclear. What is certain is that Mary's father and uncle, through family contacts, obtained permanent employment at the Hobson and Walker Brickyard in Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh. With this move the brothers became part of the migration of African American labor that took place in the early twentieth century. (2) Their experience was typical. The brothers moved first around 1900 (family records do not indicate the exact date) and established a residence and employment history. After saving money for the move, they brought the remaining family members north approximately one year later. Once the entire family was there, Mary's father, J. A. Cardwell, bought a house on N. 20th Avenue in Homestead; the house has remained in the family since that time. The neighborhood was ethnically diverse with newly arrived African Americans from the southern states living side by side with immigrants from European countries. The diversity of the neighborhood would play an important role in shaping the attitudes of his children, particularly Mary. Many members of the family were musically talented. J. A. was one of the leading singers in the church choir and often sang solos on Sunday mornings. He was protective of his voice, and often walked to church with a scarf flung around his neck to protect it in the winter. The children all sang as well, taking active roles in the musical life of the church. Mary studied piano and organ with a local teacher, Mrs. Leafie White, before continuing her training at the New England Conservatory. Her reason for choosing this particular school is not documented, but it may be assumed that the cultural opportunities available in Boston were one of the attractions for the young singer. Conservatory records do not show when she matriculated, but she was older than the traditional college student. It is apparent that she did not leave for Boston until at least 1920, at the age of 24. The reason for the delay was economic: the tuition was a sacrifice for which the family had saved for many years. Tuition at the Conservatory represented a significant percentage of a laborer's salary. For this same reason only Mary and her sister Catherine, of all the siblings, graduated from college. There simply were not funds to send all of the children. Mary's talent was judged to be the strongest and she went to school first. Her studies at the New England Conservatory included the traditional theoretical courses and performance studies in voice, piano and organ. However, she also studied choral conducting and stage production, two areas essential to her professional pursuits. She paid close attention to the professional music scene, attending concerts whenever possible. It was clear the discrimination practiced throughout American society at the time was problematic for an aspiring performer. …

Selling Bradford: Tourism and Northern Image in the Late Twentieth Century

The city of Bradford has been a pioneer of urbanlindustrial tourism since 1979, believing that, amongst other things, tourism would improve an image rooted in longheld notions about the unattractiveness of the industrial north and tarnished by a series of high profile social and economic problems. Although the strategy has had some success, the decision to place the city in the public spotlight has proved problematic. Representations of the city in a variety of media, including travel writing, have tended to reinforce and even develop new forms of northern stereotyping and thus circumscribe attempts at re-branding. The image of a city struggling to sell a somewhat less than convincing package is in danger of becoming the dominant one, pushing aside the more positive representations that the city hoped for.

Selling Bradford: Tourism and Northern Image in the Late Twentieth Century

The city of Bradford has been a pioneer of urbanlindustrial tourism since 1979, believing that, amongst other things, tourism would improve an image rooted in longheld notions about the unattractiveness of the industrial north and tarnished by a series of high profile social and economic problems. Although the strategy has had some success, the decision to place the city in the public spotlight has proved problematic. Representations of the city in a variety of media, including travel writing, have tended to reinforce and even develop new forms of northern stereotyping and thus circumscribe attempts at re-branding. The image of a city struggling to sell a somewhat less than convincing package is in danger of becoming the dominant one, pushing aside the more positive representations that the city hoped for.

George Peabody, 1795-1869: His Influence on Educational Philanthropy

For four years the American states tested a principle of union in the crucible of war. The industrial North crushed the agrarian South. To help heal the breach, the federal government created the Freedmen's Bureau. But what could the bureau do when northern radicals treated the South as a conquered province? Major General Oliver 0. Howard, the bureau's director, intended well. But his northern agents were often inefficient or corrupt. Everything conspired to make the bureau an irritant to the open sore it sought to heal. Its failure highlighted the inability of the North to effect reconciliation. What the government could not do, a private philanthropist attempted. While radical revenge smothered reconstruction, an old man and some distinguished trustees bowed their heads in prayer, gave birth to the Peabody Education Fund, and started a revival of education in the southern states. Two years after Appomattox the philanthropist founded this fund with these words: With my advancing years my attachment to my native land has become more devoted. My faith in its glorious future grows brighter and stronger. Looking beyond my stay on earth I see our country emerging from the clouds still around her, taking high rank among nations, becoming richer and more powerful than ever. To make her prosperity more than superficial her moral and intellectual development should keep pace with her material growth. I give you, my friends, one million dollars to promote and encourage the intellectual, moral, industrial education of the destitute children of the Southern states (Peabody, 1867a).

The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays after I'll Take My Stand

Scholars frequently assume that the Southern Agrarian movement was limited to the philosophy laid out in the landmark 1930 book I'll Take My Stand. Yet that work consisted mainly of a philosophical critique of a nation that valued progress above spirituality. Were it not for the Agrarians' angry reaction to criticism of their book and for a dramatic transformation of the American political and economic landscape Agrarianism would have died in 1930. But with the worsening of the Great Depression, and then Franklin D. Roosevelt's election and implementation of the New Deal, the Agrarians found their greatest opportunity to bring their ideas to the public. Encouraged by the prospect of transforming their abstraction of the South into a design for the social and economic revival of the nation, Donald Davidson, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Herman Clarence Nixon, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate wrote numerous essays countering the industrial north's place as moral exemplar; battling liberal policymakers who encouraged collective agriculture in the South; and denouncing social scientists who claimed to understand southern social relations. Emily S. Bingham and Thomas A. Underwood's carefully selected collection of six key Agrarians' essays, combined with a revealing new introduction, offers a radically revised view of the movement as it was redefined and revived during the New Deal.

The Minimum Wage and Regional Wage Structure: Implications for Income Distribution

When the minimum wage was first enacted in 1938, the fiercest opposition came from the South, where wages were considerably lower that in the industrial North. Today, that opposition is found to emanate from states that have right-to-work laws (regardless of location). Using census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for the years 1940 to 1990, this paper looks at workers earning around the minimum wage by region and industry. It shows that, controlling for education and industry type, wages tend to be depressed more in states with right-to-work legislation than in high union density states. These effects on the wage structure have implications for the distribution of income.

Melanic frequencies in three species of moths in post industrial Britain

Changing patterns of morph frequency in three moth species (Biston betularia, Odontoptera bidentata and Apocheima pilosaria) have been investigated using data from the Rothamsted Insect Survey. All three exhibited industrial melanism during the period of high atmospheric pollution in Britain. Three historical and habitat types are compared, the old industrial north of England, rural Scotland, Wales and South-West England, and a southern English intermediate region of high human population density but generally low industrialization. Between 1974 and 1999 the carbonaria morph of B. betularia declined in frequency in the industrial region and is nearly absent from rural areas. It is the form which most closely tracks atmospheric change. It is shown that the insularia forms of B. betularia and the melanic morphs in the other two species have decreased in the industrial region, commencing later than carbonaria, but have maintained their presence and possibly reached equilibrium elsewhere. They may be non-industrial polymorphisms. B. betularia is rarer than the other species and all three species are at lower densities in industrial than in non-industrial regions.

The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South

In the Cotton South before World War II, every task, from plowing to cultivating to harvesting the crop, was done by hand. These labor-intensive practices, coupled with too many farmers -- both tenants and owners -- trying to survive on small, uneconomical farms, kept the region poor, backward, and unmechanized. From 1940 to 1970, however, in the Great Migration, southern blacks and whites thronged to new opportunities in the postwar, industrial North. In this revisionist study, Donald Holley marshals impressive statistical and narrative evidence to show that mechanization occurred in the Delta region of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi only after the region's oversupply of small farmers was reduced. He thereby corrects a long-standing belief that mechanization pushed labor off the land. Development of the mechanical cotton picker not only made possible the continuation of cotton cultivation in the post-plantation era, it helped free the region of Jim Crow laws as political power was relocated from farms to cities and thereby opened the door for the civil rights movement of the 1950s. Just as President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed African Americans from chattel slavery, the mechanical cotton picker freed laborers from the drudgery of the cotton harvest and brought the agricultural South into a period of greater prosperity.

Book Review: Essentials of Clinical Psychiatry, 3rd edn

Robert E. Hales and Stuart C. YudofskyWashington DC: American Psychiatric Press, 2000ISBN 0 88048 848 1 pp.1070 $165.00Beginning psychiatry training in England's industrial north, I was given the d...

The Rise and Fall of the YCW in England

In this paper we will report some of the findings of a study of the rise and fall of the Young Christian Worker movement in England and Wales. From its origins in the industrial north in the 1930s, the movement reached its peak in the early 1950s. Since then it has declined and yet many of the current generation of Catholic activists were strongly influenced by its ideology, ecclesiology, and inductive approach to finding Christian responses to social issues. We explore from a social movement perspective what social factors contributed to its early growth. The context for its decline in recent decades are the major post-war social and post-Vatican religious changes which have transformed English Catholicism. We argue that the two stages of the decline correspond closely to the passage through adolescence and the young adult years of two successive generations in the post-war years, the 'baby boomers' and the 'baby busters'.