A Waterstones Best History Book of 2022 The bestselling history of the North of England as told through the lives of its inhabitants. ‘Entertaining’ The Times ‘Definitive’ The Mirror ‘Highly readable’ Financial Times

The word 'northern' conjures plenty of stereotypical images; men in flat caps, cobbled streets, pies and rain. But beyond the clichés lies a region rich in its diversity, devilish in its humour and fertile in its culture, and it is these characteristics that iconic photographer Sefton Samuels has captured faithfully over four decades, and are compiled here in Northerners. Described by the Guardian as 'the photographic equivalent of Ken Loach', Samuels shot legendary figures of northern life, from Alan Bennett to Morrissey, LS Lowry to George Best and Sir Ben Kingsley, but most famously and vividly he captured the realities of everyday life across the north. With snatched shots of children cheekily mugging to his camera, pictures of the more grandiose members of society at the local hunt, photos of the bleaker side of life with the riots in Moss Side, and snaps of the young and fashionable posing as they hang around with nothing to do, Northerners reveals a photographer at one with his subject; and a region whose open character was meant to be captured through a lens.

The reconciliation of North and South following the Civil War depended as much on cultural imagination as on the politics of Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nina Silber documents the transformation from hostile sectionalism to sentimental reunion rhetoric. Northern culture created a notion of reconciliation that romanticized and feminized southern society. In tourist accounts, novels, minstrel shows, and popular magazines, northerners contributed to a mythic and nostalgic picture of the South that served to counter their anxieties regarding the breakdown of class and gender roles in Gilded Age America. Indeed, for many Yankees, the ultimate symbol of the reunion process, and one that served to reinforce Victorian values as well as northern hegemony, was the marriage of a northern man and a southern woman. Southern men also were represented as affirming traditional gender roles. As northern men wrestled with their nation's increasingly global and aggressive foreign policy, the military virtues extolled in Confederate legend became more admired than reviled. By the 1890s, concludes Silber, northern whites had accepted not only a newly resplendent image of Dixie but also a sentimentalized view of postwar reunion.

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,3, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: Stereotypes are human nature and can never be avoided completely. However, stereotypes about Northern England and Northerners seem to be particularly deep-rooted and longlasting. There is general agreement that they date from the 18th and 19th century when Northern England was the starting point of the Industrial Revolution (Jewell 2). “When we speak of stereotyped characters we are dealing, in particular, with [...] traditions deriving from the effects of the Industrial Revolution” (Morris 9). The stereotypical “Northerners” are working-class people, not well educated, and their lives are full of struggle and conflict. According to many preconceptions a male Northerner is unhealthy, badly dressed and frank about sex. Further cliché attributes are pragmatic, direct and even rude, but also downto- earth, passionate and heartily. Northerners feel alienated from the government in the “centre” London and distinguish between “us” and “them” which creates to a strong sense of community. In today’s pop culture these stereotypes are predominantly media-transmitted. By using a certain mode of presenting Northern English reality and its inhabitants stereotypes are rather reinforced than replaced in the media. Hence, there is a specific pattern used to reinforce stereotypes about Northern England and Northerners in films such as in the film “Brassed off”. The most striking features that intensify these clichés in “Brassed off” are setting, language, protagonists and 4 topics. All these characteristics can be found in the scene when the Grimley Colliery Band practices Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez”; thus this scene reinforces stereotypes about Northern England to a large extent.

In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War–era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights, goals that had eluded earlier generations of black veterans. Some, like Frederick Douglass, urged immediate enlistment to support the cause of emancipation, hoping that a Northern victory would bring about the end of slavery. But others counseled patience and negotiation, drawing on a historical memory of unfulfilled promises for black military service in previous American wars and encouraging black men to leverage their position to demand abolition and equal citizenship. In doing this, they also began redefining what it meant to be a black man who fights for the United States. These debates over African Americans' enlistment expose a formative moment in the development of American citizenship: black Northerners' key demand was that military service earn full American citizenship, a term that had no precise definition prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. In articulating this demand, Taylor argues, black Northerners participated in the remaking of American citizenship itself—unquestionably one of the war's most important results.

A fictionalized account of Lee Ho-chul's inglorious yet dramatic experiences as a raw recruit in the North Korean army and, soon afterward, as a prisoner of war. Beginning with some fascinating vignettes of North Korean high school life and ending with a narrow escape from death, it offers a unique perspective on the early phases of the war.

When a Civil War substitute broker told business associates that "Men is cheep here to Day," he exposed an unsettling contradiction at the heart of the Union's war effort. Despite Northerners' devotion to the principles of free labor, the war produced rampant speculation and coercive labor arrangements that many Americans labeled fraudulent. Debates about this contradiction focused on employment agencies called "intelligence offices," institutions of dubious character that nevertheless served the military and domestic necessities of the Union army and Northern households. Northerners condemned labor agents for pocketing fees above and beyond contracts for wages between employers and employees. Yet the transactions these middlemen brokered with vulnerable Irish immigrants, Union soldiers and veterans, former slaves, and Confederate deserters defined the limits of independence in the wage labor economy and clarified who could prosper in it. Men Is Cheap shows that in the process of winning the war, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by helping to staff the Union military and Yankee households, did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class at the expense of laborers--a reality that resonates to this day.

A startling and superbly researched book demythologizing the North’s role in American slavery “The hardest question is what to do when human rights give way to profits. . . . Complicity is a story of the skeletons that remain in this nation’s closet.”—San Francisco Chronicle The North’s profit from—indeed, dependence on—slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the lucrative Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that linked the North to the West Indies and Africa. It also discloses the reality of Northern empires built on tainted profits—run, in some cases, by abolitionists—and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line. Culled from long-ignored documents and reports—and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings—Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past.

According to the 1860 census, nearly 350,000 native northerners resided in a southern state by the time of the Civil War. Although northern in birth and upbringing, many of these men and women identified with their adopted section once they moved south. In this innovative study, David Ross Zimring examines what motivated these Americans to change sections, support (or not) the Confederate cause, and, in many cases, rise to considerable influence in their new homeland. By analyzing the lives of northern emigrants in the South, Zimring deepens our understanding of the nature of sectional identity as well as the strength of Confederate nationalism. Focusing on a representative sample of emigrants, Zimring identifies two subgroups: “adoptive southerners,” individuals born and raised in a state above the Mason-Dixon line but who but did not necessarily join the Confederacy after they moved south, and “Northern Confederates,” emigrants who sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. After analyzing statistical data on states of origin, age, education, decade of migration, and, most importantly, the reasons why these individuals embarked for the South in the first place, Zimring goes on to explore the prewar lives of adoptive southerners, the adaptations they made with regard to slavery, and the factors that influenced their allegiances during the secession crisis. He also analyzes their contributions to the Confederate military and home front, the emergence of their Confederate identities and nationalism, their experiences as prisoners of war in the North, and the reactions they elicited from native southerners. In tracing these journeys from native northerner to Confederate veteran, this book reveals not only the complex transformations of adoptive southerners but also the flexibility of sectional and national identity before the war and the loss of that flexibility in its aftermath. To Live and Die in Dixie is a thought-provoking work that provides a novel perspective on the revolutionary changes the Civil War unleashed on American society.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, American Library Association (2021) From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its European counterparts, it deserved independence. In Newest Born of Nations, Ann Tucker utilizes print sources such as newspapers and magazines to reveal how elite white southerners developed an international perspective on nationhood that helped them clarify their own national values, conceive of the South as distinct from the North, and ultimately define and legitimize the Confederacy. While popular at home, claims to equivalency with European nations failed to resonate with Europeans and northerners, who viewed slavery as incompatible with liberal nationalism. Forced to reevaluate their claims about the international place of southern nationalism, some southerners redoubled their attempts to place the Confederacy within the broader trends of nineteenth-century nationalism. More conservative southerners took a different tack, emphasizing the distinctiveness of their nationalism, claiming that the Confederacy actually purified nationalism through slavery. Southern Unionists likewise internationalized their case for national unity. By examining the evolution of and variation within these international perspectives, Tucker reveals the making of a southern nationhood to be a complex, contested process.