This is the story of Leonidas Polk, whose name was destined to become a national byword. In 1889 he was elected president of the Farmers' Alliance, the largest agricultural organization in American history. The agrarian reforms that Polk had championed led to the agrarian crusdae" and the New Deal. Originally published in 1949. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Significant as a political, economic, and social organization, the southern Farmers' Alliance was the largest and most influential farmers' organization in the history of the United States until the rise of the American Farm Bureau Federation. McMath suggests that the ideas advanced by the People's party in the 1890s had been incubated within the alliance and that the shared experience of 1.5 million rural Americans helped give those ideas power in the Populist crusade. Originally published 1976. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Polk's Folly is William Polk's captivating investigation of his impressive family tree and of the broader American tale it narrates. Growing up in Texas in the late 1930s, listening to his grandmother's memories of her childhood amidst the Civil War, Polk became fascinated by tales of his family's engagement in monumental moments of our nation's history. Beginning when Robert Pollok fled Ireland in the 1680s, Polk's saga includes an Indian trader, an early drafter of the Declaration of Independence, one of our greatest presidents, heroes and rascals on both sides of the Civil War, Indian fighters, a World War I diplomat, and Polk's own brother, a journalist who reported on the Nuremberg Trials. Full of stunning detail and based on primary historical documents, Polk's Folly is a grand American chronicle that allows history to include the lives that made it happen.

Following the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans organized a movement—distinct from the white Populist movement—in the South and parts of the Midwest for economic and political reform: Black Populism. Between 1886 and 1898, tens of thousands of black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers created their own organizations and tactics primarily under black leadership. As Black Populism grew as a regional force, it met fierce resistance from the Southern Democrats and constituent white planters and local merchants. African Americans carried out a wide range of activities in this hostile environment. They established farming exchanges and cooperatives; raised money for schools; published newspapers; lobbied for better agrarian legislation; mounted boycotts against agricultural trusts and business monopolies; carried out strikes for better wages; protested the convict lease system, segregated coach boxes, and lynching; demanded black jurors in cases involving black defendants; promoted local political reforms and federal supervision of elections; and ran independent and fusion campaigns. Growing out of the networks established by black churches and fraternal organizations, Black Populism found further expression in the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the southern branch of the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, the Farmers Union, and the Colored Farmers Alliance. In the early 1890s African Americans, together with their white counterparts, launched the People's Party and ran fusion campaigns with the Republican Party. By the turn of the century, Black Populism had been crushed by relentless attack, hostile propaganda, and targeted assassinations of leaders and foot soldiers of the movement. The movement's legacy remains, though, as the largest independent black political movement until the rise of the modern civil rights movement.

Orr traces Aycock's growth from farm boy to practicing lawyer and on to that final eminence in which his fame spread beyond the state in connection with his brilliant oratory, his interest in public education, and his devotion to the Democratic party. His life became a legend long before he died, at the age of fifty-two, delivering an address titled Universal Education. Originally published in 1961. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

During the Civil War era, black and white North Carolinians were forced to fundamentally reinterpret the morality of suicide, divorce, and debt as these experiences became pressing issues throughout the region and nation. In Moments of Despair, David Silkenat explores these shifting sentiments. Antebellum white North Carolinians stigmatized suicide, divorce, and debt, but the Civil War undermined these entrenched attitudes, forcing a reinterpretation of these issues in a new social, cultural, and economic context in which they were increasingly untethered from social expectations. Black North Carolinians, for their part, used emancipation to lay the groundwork for new bonds of community and their own interpretation of social frameworks. Silkenat argues that North Carolinians' attitudes differed from those of people outside the South in two respects. First, attitudes toward these cultural practices changed more abruptly and rapidly in the South than in the rest of America, and second, the practices were interpreted through a prism of race. Drawing upon a robust and diverse body of sources, including insane asylum records, divorce petitions, bankruptcy filings, diaries, and personal correspondence, this innovative study describes a society turned upside down as a consequence of a devastating war.

A major reinterpretation of the Populist movement, this text argues that the Populists were modern people, rejecting the notion that Populism opposed modernity and progress.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

On September 7, 1864, William Whitlock, aged thirty-five, left his wife and four children in Allegany, New York, to join the Union army in battle. More than 100 years later, his unpublished letters to his wife were found in the attic of a family home. These letters serve as the foundation for Allegany to Appomattox, giving readers a vivid glimpse into the environment and political atmosphere that surrounded the Civil War from the perspective of a northern farmer and lumberman. Whitlock’s observations tell of exhausting marches, limited rations, and grueling combat. In plainspoken language, the letters also reveal a desperate homesickness, consistently expressing concern for the family’s health and financial situation and requesting news from home. Dunham’s detailed descriptions of the war’s progress and specific battles provide a rich context for Whitlock’s letters, orienting readers to both the broad narrative of the Civil War and the intimate chronicle of one soldier’s impressions.

The People’s Party, the most successful third party in America’s history, emerged from the Populist Movement of the late 1800s. And of the People’s Party, there was perhaps no more exemplary proponent than homesteader Isaac Beckley Werner of Stafford County, Kansas. Very much a man of his community, Werner contributed columns to the County Capital and other Kansas newspapers, spoke at the county seat, regularly attended Populist lectures, and—most fortunately for posterity—from 1884 until a few years before his death in 1895, kept a journal reporting on the world around him and noting the advice of Henry Ward Beecher. With this journal as a starting point, Isaac Beckley Werner, prairie bachelor, becomes an eloquent guide to the practical, social, and political realities of rural life in late nineteenth-century Kansas. In this portrait Lynda Beck Fenwick finds the Populist thinking that would eventually take hold in numerous ways, big and small, in American life—and would make a mark the imprint of which can be seen in the nation’s political culture to this day. Expanding her search to local cemeteries, courthouses, museums, and fields where homesteaders once staked their claims, Fenwick reveals a farming community much denser than today’s, where Prohibition, women’s rights, and income inequality were shared concerns, and where enduring problems, like substance abuse, immigration, and racial bias, made an early appearance. The Populist Movement both arose from and focused upon these issues, as Werner’s journal demonstrates; and in his world of farmers, small-town businessmen, engaged women, and working people, Fenwick’s Prairie Bachelor shows us the provenance and lived reality of a rural populism that would forever alter the American political scene.