Last of American Freemen, The: Studies in the Political Culture of the Colonial and Revolutionary South
| By author: | Weir |
Product Code:
H164
ISBN:
9780865541740
Product Format:
Hardback
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$35.00
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The Last of American Freeman Robert M. Weir illustrates his mastery of the historian’s craft and the essayist’s art. In nine essays written over the past twenty years-several of them generally acknowledged as seminal contributions to scholarly understanding of the Revolutionary era- Professor Weir analyzes the character of local politics during the colonial period and its portents for the distinctive behavior of South Carolinians in the nineteenth century.
Each essay deals in one-way or another with the political culture of the region-the body of assumptions, beliefs, customs, and ideals that conditioned political behavior- and with individual whose actions exemplified or defied this culture. Taken as whole, these essays document the peculiar staying power of political culture and leadership in the Southern colonies-especially South Carolina-from the Revolutionary era onwards. The legacy of the eighteenth century, Weir reports with careful irony, is clearly visible in the antebellum South, and nowhere more than in South Carolina.
What historians have seen as “the problem of South Carolina”-that is, its political extremism in the nineteenth century-was partly due to the successful development during the late colonial period of a political system closely resembling prevailing ideas and, thus resistant to change.