Author Description

Despite its idiosyncrasies, Mississippi offers historians a better view of the nineteenth-century South than does any other state. Between 1830 and 1860 it evolved from a sparsely settled wilderness into a prosperous part of the cotton kingdom only to emerge from the 1860s impoverished and in search of industrial-commercial development. Bradley G. Bond tells the story of a century by tracing the social ethic of white Mississippians and describing its effect on the political culture. He argues that the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, industrialization, and modernization severely tried and significantly modified this social ethic, but ultimately it was forged of an enduring principle: unification among whites and suppression of class conflict through racism. Political Culture in the Nineteenth-Century South is based on voluminous research. Bond supports his argument by making use of scores of primary sources, many of which lend a personal, lively turn to his expansive history. The story of Mississippi is in many ways the story of the South, and this original, exciting study of how that society and its values each shaped the other will have repercussions across many disciplines.