Cotton Tenants

Cotton Tenants PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612192130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the “most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” The origins of Agee and Evans’s famous collaboration date back to an assignment for Fortune magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune’s editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that marked Famous Men, and for years the original report was presumed lost. But fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for Fortune. Published here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.”

Cotton Tenants

Cotton Tenants PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612192130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the “most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” The origins of Agee and Evans’s famous collaboration date back to an assignment for Fortune magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune’s editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that marked Famous Men, and for years the original report was presumed lost. But fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for Fortune. Published here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.”

Cotton Tenants

Cotton Tenants PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
ISBN: 1612192122
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
In the summer of 1936, James Agee set out with photographer Walker Evans on an assignment for Fortune magazine. Their mission was to explore the plight of sharecroppers during the Great Depression. The journey fostered an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when the resulting report was turned into a book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941. Agee's original dispatch, accompanied by 25 of Walker Evans' historic photos, is an unsparing record of place and of three families who worked the land at a desperate time.

Cotton Tenants

Cotton Tenants PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781612193984
Category : Alabama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Penguin Classics, 2006). It was a book which shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Cotton Tenats is an indispensable companion piece. The history of this new volume can be traced back to an assignment for Fortune magazine, which sent Agee and Evans to Alabama in the summer of 1936 and formed the basis for Famous Men. A recent re-examination of Fortune's archives showed that the report was far larger than previously thought - it is this material that forms the basis of Cotton Tenants.

Cry from the Cotton

Cry from the Cotton PDF Author: Donald Grubbs
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1557285225
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union was founded in eastern Arkansas in 1934 to protest the New Deal's enrichment of Southern cotton barons at the expense of suffering sharecroppers, both black and white. Their courageous struggle, in the face of determined and often violent resistance from their landlords, is the subject of this thorough study from Donald H. Grubbs, which was published to critical acclaim in 1971. Cry from the Cotton was the first full-scale look at the STFU and its leaders. It discloses that, although the union operated under noticeable socialist party sponsorship in its infancy, it drew much more upon the native Southern evangelical and populist traditions, much as the civil rights movement would do twenty-five years later. Grubbs convincingly demonstrates that while the STFU failed to gain immediate social justice for its members, it resulted in the formation of the Farm Security Administration, which even today continues to aid the rural poor, and it played a large part in forcing the formation of the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, whose spotlight on management terrorism helped the CIO toward success. The volume stands as a classic on labor issues and class struggle and still echoes with the haunting plea of the dispossessed for equity.

Texas, Cotton, And The New Deal

Texas, Cotton, And The New Deal PDF Author: Keith Joseph Volanto
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585444021
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Cotton growing-Government policy-Texas-Historly 2. Cotton trade-government policy-Texas-History. 3. New Deal1933-1939-Texas. 4. United States.

The White Scourge

The White Scourge PDF Author: Neil Foley
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520918528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In a book that fundamentally challenges our understanding of race in the United States, Neil Foley unravels the complex history of ethnicity in the cotton culture of central Texas. This engrossing narrative, spanning the period from the Civil War through the collapse of tenant farming in the early 1940s, bridges the intellectual chasm between African American and Southern history on one hand and Chicano and Southwestern history on the other. The White Scourge describes a unique borderlands region, where the cultures of the South, West, and Mexico overlap, to provide a deeper understanding of the process of identity formation and to challenge the binary opposition between "black" and "white" that often dominates discussions of American race relations. In Texas, which by 1890 had become the nation's leading cotton-producing state, the presence of Mexican sharecroppers and farm workers complicated the black-white dyad that shaped rural labor relations in the South. With the transformation of agrarian society into corporate agribusiness, white racial identity began to fracture along class lines, further complicating categories of identity. Foley explores the "fringe of whiteness," an ethno-racial borderlands comprising Mexicans, African Americans, and poor whites, to trace shifting ideologies and power relations. By showing how many different ethnic groups are defined in relation to "whiteness," Foley redefines white racial identity as not simply a pinnacle of status but the complex racial, social, and economic matrix in which power and privilege are shared. Foley skillfully weaves archival material with oral history interviews, providing a richly detailed view of everyday life in the Texas cotton culture. Addressing the ways in which historical categories affect the lives of ordinary people, The White Scourge tells the broader story of racial identity in America; at the same time it paints an evocative picture of a unique American region. This truly multiracial narrative touches on many issues central to our understanding of American history: labor and the role of unions, gender roles and their relation to ethnicity, the demise of agrarian whiteness, and the Mexican-American experience.

Condition of Farmers in a White-farmer Area of the Cotton Piedmont, 1924-1926

Condition of Farmers in a White-farmer Area of the Cotton Piedmont, 1924-1926 PDF Author: Howard Archibald Turner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Farm tenancy
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description


Tenants and Nomads in Eastern Sudan

Tenants and Nomads in Eastern Sudan PDF Author: Gunnar M. Sørbø
Publisher: Nordic Africa Institute
ISBN: 9789171062420
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Case study of agricultural development and social change among nomads and tenant farmers under the New Halfa Scheme in Eastern Sudan since 1970 - describes the farming system imposed by the land settlement scheme; notes agricultural management problems and poor crop yield, accompanied by social stratification, proletarianization and rural migration; draws some development policy conclusions. Bibliography, graphs, maps, photographs, statistical tables.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men PDF Author: James Agee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alabama
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
An account of the actual daily lives of three families of tenant farmers which are representative of their class in the year 1936.

Tenants of the Almighty

Tenants of the Almighty PDF Author: Arthur Franklin Raper
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
The story of Greene county, Georgia, and its unified farm program. cf. Foreword.