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Politics

 

Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences

 

Making Race, Making Power: North Carolina's Road to Disfranchisement by Kent Redding (University of Illinois Press) In this groundbreaking work, Kent Redding, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, examines the fluid political landscape of the nineteenth-century South, revealing the complex interplay between the elites’ manipulation of political and racial identity and the innovative mobilization strategies marginalized groups adopted to combat disfranchisement.

Far from being a low-level, localized trend, the struggle for power in North Carolina was felt across the country as race- and class-based organizing challenged the dominant models of making and holding power.

Redding reveals how the ruling class operated with motivations and methods very similar to those of the black voters and Populist farmers they fought against. He deftly tracks how the elites co-opted the innovative mobilizing strategies of the subordinate groups to effectively use their own weapons against them.

Chapters include:

  • The Structuring of Southern Voter Turnout
  • North Carolina Democratic Politics and Society in the 1880s: Democratic Control through Localism
  • Making and Blocking Republican Power
  • The Demise of Democratic Localism and the Rise of Populism
  • The Failed Alternatives to Democratic Rule: Movement-Party Disjunctions in Populism
  • Democrats Transformed, Democracy Undone

At the core of Making Race, Making Power is an insightful and subtle dissection of the concrete connections between political strategies of solidarity and exclusion and underlying patterns of race relations.

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