TOPIC The War, Reconstruction, and the new status of the South as a conquered colony of the industrial North created something historians call the “New South.” The term suggests a radical break with the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Northern elites hoped to transform the South through Yankee immigration, technology, ideas, and money into a Southern version of New England. Southerners struggled with great changes in labor and capital, race relations, manners, religion, education, and with a new vision…