Women’s groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy along with war veterans played an important role in preserving Confederate memory through Memorial Day celebrations and the construction of monuments. As they did, however, they began to retell the history of the recent past. In 1905, for instance, North Carolinian Thomas F. Dixon published a novel, While Lost Cause defenders mythologized their past, New South boosters struggled to wrench the South into the modern world. The ambitions of Atlanta, seen in the construction of grand buildings like the Kimball House Hotel, reflect the larger regional aspirations to thrive in this so-called era of the “New South.” Photograph of the second Kimball House scanned from an 1890 book. They were mutilated, burned alive, and shot. The cotton South was home to the twelve wealthiest counties in the country before the war. Better-paying jobs were reserved for whites, while the most dangerous, labor-intensive, dirtiest, and lowest-paying positions were relegated to African Americans. If measured by industrial output and railroad construction, the New South was certainly a reality, if, relative the rest of the nation, a limited one. Emancipation unsettled the southern social order. One of thousands of lynchings throughout the South in the late nineteenth and century twentieth centuries, this particular case of the lynching of a mother and son garnered national attention.

As one ex-slave put it, “No day dawns for the slave, nor is …

By the turn of the twentieth century, the idealized Lost Cause past was entrenched not only in the South but throughout the country. African American women, shut out of most industries, found employment most often as domestic help for white families.

In the American South, an Inequity of Diseases A wave of 120 hospital closures in rural America over the past decade has left many parts of the South with no nearby hospital, and many of those that remain have drastically offloaded services and staff to stay afloat. The average life expectancy of an African American was 33 years--a dozen years less than that of a white American and about the same as a peasant in early 19th century India. Life during the 1800s in America was already difficult for many people. One notorious example occurred in Georgia in 1899. Of course there were rich factory owners in the North and plantation owners in the South, but the average farmer and his family worked extremely hard just to survive. Boosters campaigned for the construction new hard-surfaced roads as well, arguing that improved roads would further increase the flow of goods and people and entice northern businesses to relocate to the region. Although Olmsted abhorred slavery, his accounts were objective and accepted by most Southern critics as accurate depictions of plantation life. Much of the New South, then, was anything but. We join Olmsted's account as he accompanies an overseer on a tour of a large, prosperous plantation in Mississippi: Members of the mob tortured Hose for about an hour.

Across the South towns erected statues of General Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals. Discrimination in employment and housing and the legal segregation of public and private life reflected the rise of a new Jim Crow South. Separate coach laws were some of the first such laws to appear, beginning in Tennessee in the 1880s. A kind of civic religion known as the “Lost Cause” glorified the Confederacy and romanticized the Old South. Grady might have declared the Confederate South dead, but its memory pervaded the thoughts and actions of white southerners.Lost Cause champions overtook the South. So-called Jim Crow laws legalized what custom had long dictated. Lynching not only killed its victims, it served as a symbolic act, an intimidation of some and a ritual for others.Victims were not simply hanged, they were tortured. Many prominent white Southerners hoped to rebuild the South’s economy and psychology, to confront post-Reconstruction uncertainties, and to convince the nation that the South could be more than an economically backward, race-obsessed backwater. Later that year, Wells publishedLynching was only the violent worst of the South’s racial world. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. Black activists and white allies worked to outlaw lynching.