Reviews for The Confederate carpetbaggers

The average rating for The Confederate carpetbaggers based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-11-29 00:00:00 Jay North A fascinating dual-location study of free African American families who relocated from northeastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia to the mid-western American frontier in the 1830s and 1840s. These families were often mixed race, perhaps never enslaved. In the 1830s, the younger generations looked to seek new vistas and fresh opportunities in the uncertain climate of rising white hostility towards them. A second significant factor appeared to have been their declining ability to purchase additional land for multiple children in that generation. This shrewd strategy, crafted to place themselves just behind the moving frontier line, with good farming land, and near to Quaker-heavy communities less hostile to free African Americans served these families well though most of the 1800s. By 1900, these communities faced the same challenges as did white farm families. The growth of industrial farming, declining profits, and the pull of urbanization combined to reduce the relative continuity and seclusion of these communities. Yet, interestingly, these quite unique families and communities retained a sensibility of place and uniqueness into the mid-20th century, alongside other groups senses of their own heritages. Many decedents of those original free African American migrants went on to substantial professional and business accomplishments up to the time of the book's publication.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-25 00:00:00 Andr� Cormier Laura Dassow Walls ΦBK, University of Washington, 1976 Author From the publisher: Thoreau was a poet, a naturalist, a major American writer. Was he also a scientist? He was, Laura Dassow Walls suggests. Her book, the first to consider Thoreau as a serious and committed scientist, will change the way we understand his accomplishment and the place of science in American culture. Walls reveals that the scientific texts of Thoreau’s day deeply influenced his best work, from Walden to the Journal to the late natural history essays. Here we see how, just when literature and science were splitting into the “two cultures” we know now, Thoreau attempted to heal the growing rift. Walls shows how his commitment to Alexander von Humboldt’s scientific approach resulted in not only his “marriage” of poetry and science but also his distinctively patterned nature studies. In the first critical study of his “The Dispersion of Seeds” since its publication in 1993, she exposes evidence that Thoreau was using Darwinian modes of reasoning years before the appearance of Origin of Species. This book offers a powerful argument against the critical tradition that opposes a dry, mechanistic science to a warm, “organic” Romanticism. Instead, Thoreau’s experience reveals the complex interaction between Romanticism and the dynamic, law-seeking science of its day. Drawing on recent work in the theory and philosophy of science as well as literary history and theory, Seeing New Worlds bridges today’s “two cultures” in hopes of stimulating a fuller consideration of representations of nature.