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A History of the Ozarks, Volume 2

The Conflicted Ozarks

ISBN-13: 9780252042737
Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
By Brooks Blevins
Price: AUD $90.99
Stock: 0 in stock
Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 14/11/2019
Format: Hardback 320 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: History of the Americas [HBJK]

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Reviews
Google Preview: The Ozarks of the mid-1800s was a land of divisions. The uplands and its people inhabited a geographic and cultural borderland straddling Midwest and West, North and South, frontier and civilization, and secessionist and Unionist. As civil war raged across the region, neighbor turned against neighbor, unleashing a generation of animus and violence that lasted long after 1865.

The second volume of Brooks Blevins's history of the Ozarks begins with the region's distinctive relationship to slavery. Because the Ozarks were largely unsuitable for plantation farming, residents used enslaved persons on a smaller scale or, in some places, not at all. Blevins moves on to the devastating Civil War years where the dehumanizing, personal nature of Ozark conflict was made uglier by the predations of marching armies and criminal gangs. Blending personal stories with a wide narrative scope, he examines how civilians and soldiers alike experienced the war, from brutal partisan warfare to ill-advised refugee policies to women's struggles to safeguard farms and stay alive in an atmosphere of constant danger. The war stunted the region's growth, delaying the development of Ozarks society and the processes of physical, economic, and social reconstruction. More and more, striving uplanders dedicated to modernization fought an image of the Ozarks as a land of mountaineers and hillbillies hostile to the idea of progress. Yet the dawn of the twentieth century saw the uplands emerge as an increasingly uniform culture forged, for better and worse, in the tumult of a conflicted era.; Brooks Blevins's second volume of A History of the Ozarks is the work of a premier historian and a master storyteller. Whether the topic is Civil War guerrillas or postwar Bald Knobbers, Blevins peels away the layers of myth and legend to reveal the region's heritage and history in all its complexity. Highly recommended for both the scholar and the general reader.--William Garrett Piston, coauthor of Wilson's Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It; Google Preview content