Author | : James Oakes |
File Size | : 45,6 Mb |
Publisher | : Knopf |
Language | : English |
Release Date | : 17 April 2013 |
ISBN | : 9780307828132 |
Pages | : 406 pages |
The Ruling Race by James Oakes Book PDF Summary
This pathbreaking social history of the slaveholding South marks a turn in our understanding of antebellum America and the coming of the Civil War. Oakes's bracing analysis breaks the myth that slaveholders were a paternalistic aristocracy dedicated to the values of honor, race, and section. Instead they emerge as having much in common with their entrepreneurial counterparts in the North: they were committed to free-market commercialism and political democracy for white males. The Civil War was not an inevitable conflict between civilizations on different paths but the crack-up of a single system, the result of people and events.