Arguing that the slaveholders’ idea of an oligarchic America triumphed with the growth of the second American oligarchy in the latter half of the 20th century, Richardson shows how the rise of movement conservatism, as personified by Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign, came to embody this vision of an oligarchic America. Known for her newsletter Letters From an American, which seeks to explain current political events through a historical lens, she deftly demonstrates her skill writing for a public audience in How the South Won the Civil War. A history professor at Boston College, Richardson has written numerous books on the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as on the Republican Party, and she draws from her considerable scholarly oeuvre for this slim and accessible volume. Throughout American history, she contends, the forces of oligarchy and democracy have been involved in a mortal struggle for the nation’s future, and she wants to show how the visions of oligarchy have often won out-how, in other words, we got from the era of emancipation and Confederate defeat to the presidency of Donald Trump. ![]() This is the argument presented in Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, How the South Won the Civil War. How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America Yet even in defeat, its language of oligarchy and its opposition to progressive political and economic policies through an appeal to racism has been adopted by the modern Republican Party. The Jim Crow South was upended by the civil rights revolution. Even today it leads in indices for poverty and weak educational systems. 1 economic problem, resistant to unionization and social policies. By the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt called the South the nation’s No. ![]() In the late 19th century, after the overthrow of Reconstruction, many of its state governments disenfranchised Black men, instituted racial segregation, condoned racial terrorism and violence, and kept a majority of Black and white Southerners economically bound through sharecropping, debt peonage, convict lease labor, and tenancy. Despite a brief experiment in interracial democracy during the Reconstruction years, for much of its history the region has upheld a regime of brutal racial subordination. ![]() The average person may be forgiven for thinking that the South actually won the Civil War.
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