PDF Charter and the Amendments Thereof and Ordinances of the City of Cairo Download
- Author: Cairo (Ill.)
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- Category : Cairo (Ill.)
- Languages : en
- Pages : 224
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A free region deeply influenced by southern mores, the Lower Middle West represented a true cultural and political median in Civil War-era America. Here grew a Unionism steeped in the mythology of the Loyal West--a myth rooted in regional and racial animosities and the belief that westerners had won the war. Matthew E. Stanley's intimate study explores the Civil War, Reconstruction, and sectional reunion in this bellwether region. Using the lives of area soldiers and officers as a lens, Stanley reveals a place and a strain of collective memory that was anti-rebel, anti-eastern, and anti-black in its attitudes--one that came to be at the forefront of the northern retreat from Reconstruction and toward white reunion. The Lower Middle West's embrace of black exclusion laws, origination of the Copperhead movement, backlash against liberalizing war measures, and rejection of Reconstruction were all pivotal to broader American politics. And the region's legacies of white supremacy--from racialized labor violence to sundown towns to lynching--found malignant expression nationwide, intersecting with how Loyal Westerners remembered the war.
Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, was a city favored by geography and climate. It was founded in the early 1800s on great expectations. Its location at the head of major rivers navigable both summer and winter and its proximity to coal fields generated predictions that Cairo would soon surpass Louisville, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and even Chicago. Yet it failed to realize the success its promoters believed inevitable.Using mainly primary sources such as newspapers, city council records, and census data, Herman R. Lantz has traced the history of the city and has pinpointed the economic, social, and psychological factors that helped to retard Cairo s progress while other cities with the same, or even fewer, advantages flourished. The result is an important socio-historical contribution that attempts to explore the process of community failure in the perspective of national success."