Bøger af Paul Gaston

In Man and Mission: E. B. Gaston and the Origins of the Fairhope Single Tax Colony, historian Paul Gaston relates his grandfather's 1864 founding of the utopian community of Fairhope, Alabama. The twenty-eight "Fairhopers" hoped to realize an "equality of opportunity, the full reward of individual efforts, and the benefits of co-operation in matters of general concern," at a time when the economic system of the United States was ravaged by monopoly capitalism. Using family and public records, Man and Mission gives an intimate view of a vibrant moment in the history of Gilded Age America.

During the depression of the 1890s, a young Iowa newspaperman, indignant over the excesses of the Gilded Age, led a group of midwesterners to the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, where they established a model community based on the utopian ideals of Henry George. In Women of Fair Hope, Paul M. Gaston follows the dreams and achievements of three extraordinary women-an early feminist reformer, an educator, and a freed slave-whose individual desires to create a fairer, more equitable society led them to play important roles in the life of that community.

First published in 1970, The New South Creed has lost none of its usefulness to anyone examining the dream of a "New South"-prosperous, powerful, racially harmonious-that developed in the three decades after the Civil War, and the transformation of that dream into widely accepted myths, shielding and perpetuating a conservative, racist society. Many young moderates of the period created a philosophy designed to enrich the region-attempting to both restore the power and prestige and to lay the race question to rest. In spite of these men and their efforts, their dream of a New South joined the Antebellum illusion as a genuine social myth, with a controlling power over the way in which their followers, in both North and South, perceived reality.