University of Virginia Press
Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction
Key Metrics
- Nicolas Barreyre
- University of Virginia Press
- Paperback
- 9780813947259
- -
- -
- History > United States - Civil War Period (1850-1877)
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Historians have long treated Reconstruction primarily as a southern concern isolated from broader national political developments. Yet at its core, Reconstruction was a battle for the legacy of the Civil War that would determine the political fate not only of the South but of the nation.
In Gold and Freedom, Nicolas Barreyre recovers the story of how economic issues became central to American politics after the war. The idea that a financial debate was as important for Reconstruction as emancipation may seem remarkable, but the war created economic issues that all Americans, not just southerners, had to grapple with, including a huge debt, an inconvertible paper currency, high taxation, and tariffs. Alongside the key issues of race and citizenship, the struggle with the new economic model and the type of society it created pervaded the entire country. Both were legacies of war. Both were fought over by the same citizens in a newly reunited nation. It was thus impossible for such closely related debates to proceed independently.
A truly groundbreaking work, Gold and Freedom shows how much the fate of Reconstruction--and the political world it ultimately created--owed to northern sectional divisions, revealing important links between race and economy, as well as region and nation, not previously recognized.
Author Bio
Nicolas Barreyre is Associate Professor in American History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris and author of The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics (2011).
Nicolas Barreyre is a lecturer at the EHESS, and in 2015-2016 faculty fellow at the Charles Warren Center in Harvard. His first book, L'or et la liberté (Éditions de l'EHESS, 2014) explores the spatial dimension of American political history, and offers a reinterpretation of the Reconstruction period that integrates political economy issues into questions citizenship and race relations. Her current work focuses on the organization and forms of the American state in the nineteenth century, and is particularly interested in the institutional effects of political economy, and the links it forges between citizens and the political system. State.
He is also a member of the editorial board of the Annales. History, Social Sciences .
Source: EHESS.fr
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