ABSTRACT
Nashville from New South to ‘new’ New South The end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, and the accompanying dissolution of the South’s social, economic, and political basis in slavery, ushered in the era of the ‘New South’ (Foster, 1987; Doyle, 1990; Silber, 1993). During this period of optimistic boosterism and dramatic transitions, the region became more tightly integrated into national flows of commerce and culture along improved transportation and communication routes; and southern cities grew in size and stature through the in-migration of White and Black rural southerners (Doyle, 1990; Kyriakoudes, 2003). In this making of the modern, and increasingly urban South, Nashville, Tennessee emerged as ‘one of the most aggressive centers of economic development and social change’ in the region (Doyle, 1990, p. 15). A key distribution site between the Midwest and the South, Nashville, along with Atlanta, quickly rose to the top of financial, political, and cultural centers in the postbellum South. In the words of historian Louis Kyriakoudes (2003), ‘(i)f the promise of the New South boosters would ever ring true, it would be in Nashville’ (p. 2), where the imprints of the Civil War and subsequent reconstruction efforts had been light and the economic opportunities associated with rebuilding the defeated region had been quickly grasped (Doyle, 1990). Drawing rural resources into its expanding economy and rural workers into its expanding labor market, Nashville in the second half of the nineteenth century was a prime site for new dreams and ambitions about the New South, even if many of those dreams proved to be elusive (Kyriakoudes, 2003).
