| Title | : | The Ruling Race |
|---|---|---|
| Author | : | James Oakes |
| Release | : | 1982-04-12 |
| Kind | : | ebook |
| Genre | : | Social Science, Books, Nonfiction, History, U.S. History |
| Size | : | 7159192 |
| 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. |
