How "Modern" Was the Old South?

Resource person: Audra Bullard - office@clehighlands.com

Description:

Southern slaveholders went to great lengths to portray themselves as custodians of a backward-looking, noble society, one that drew its strength from the past and fought against the recklessness of the modern future of free wage labor and democracy. In their architecture, literature, and in the institution of slavery itself, they fashioned themselves as feudal lords, heirs to a past they admired and cherished. Beneath this facade, however, was a modern, highly exploitative system of labor, one that gave rise to one of the most “progressive” societies in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century. This lecture explores how, beneath the gloss of genteel aristocracy, the Old South pioneered some of the most modern, even capitalistic innovations in the world.

Presenter: Mark Smith is a Historian of American History, Director of the Institute for Southern Studies, and a Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is a scholar of environmental disasters, southern history, and of sensory history, which he described to an interviewer as stressing “the role of the senses” – including sight and vision – in shaping people’s experience in the past.

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