Description: Nash analyzes the unfolding of Reconstruction in the mountain counties of southern Appalachia, focusing on the particular ways that region's patterns of development, relatively low levels of prewar slaveholding, political allegiances, histories of violence, etc., shaped the era politically and socially. Nash chronicles the region's political transformation, first as a new politics predicated on wartime loyalty rose in place of the prewar partisan system. He argues this first transition was followed by a further transformation as anti-Confederates relied on the federal government (mostly in the form of the Freedmen's Bureau) to establish a coherent party and platform in the region. Finally, Nash shows how the Conservative resurgence toppled this new regime, with conservatives aggressively courting new economic development schemes in order to connect the region into the burgeoning national markets--
Brief description: Steven E. Nash is assistant professor of history at East Tennessee State University.
Review Quotes:
"Deeply researched and engagingly written, Reconstruction's Ragged Edge provides new insight into a complex and tumultuous past and can be warmly welcomed as further evidence of the upland region's escape from the margins of southern historiography."--Journal of American History