Moments of Despair Suicide Divorce and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina 1st Edition by David Silkenat ISBN 0807834602 9780807834602

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Product details:

ISBN 10: 0807834602

ISBN 13: 9780807834602 

Author: David Silkenat

During the Civil War era, black and white North Carolinians were forced to fundamentally reinterpret the morality of suicide, divorce, and debt as these experiences became pressing issues throughout the region and nation. In Moments of Despair, David Silkenat explores these shifting sentiments.

Antebellum white North Carolinians stigmatized suicide, divorce, and debt, but the Civil War undermined these entrenched attitudes, forcing a reinterpretation of these issues in a new social, cultural, and economic context in which they were increasingly untethered from social expectations. Black North Carolinians, for their part, used emancipation to lay the groundwork for new bonds of community and their own interpretation of social frameworks. Silkenat argues that North Carolinians’ attitudes differed from those of people outside the South in two respects. First, attitudes toward these cultural practices changed more abruptly and rapidly in the South than in the rest of America, and second, the practices were interpreted through a prism of race. Drawing upon a robust and diverse body of sources, including insane asylum records, divorce petitions, bankruptcy filings, diaries, and personal correspondence, this innovative study describes a society turned upside down as a consequence of a devastating war.

Table of contents:

Part I: By His Own Hand: Suicide

1. Most Horrible of Crimes: Suicide in the Old South
2. The Self-Slaying Epidemic: Suicide after the Civil War
3. The Legacy of the War We Suppose: Suicide in Medical and Social Thought

Part II: To Loosen the Bands of Society: Divorce
4. The Country Is Also a Party: Antebellum Divorce in Black and White
5. Connubial Bliss until He Entered the Army by Conscription: Civil War and Divorce
6. The Divorce Mill Runs Over Time: Marital Breakdown and Reform in the New South

Part III: Enslaved by Debt: The Culture of Credit and Debt
7. Sacredness of Obligations: Debt in Antebellum North Carolina
8. Out of Debt before I Die: The Credit Crisis of the Civil War
9. What the Landlord and the Storeman Choose to Make It: General Stores, Pawnshops, and Boardinghouses in the New South
10. Nothing Less than a Question of Slavery or Freedom: Populism and the Crisis of Debt in the New South

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Tags: David Silkenat, Moments, Despair, Suicide, Divorce, Debt, Civil, War, North, Carolina