The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War

The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War PDF Author: Charles S. Aiken
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421436124
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
Winner of the J. B. Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers Originally published in 1998. "The plantation," writes Charles Aiken, "is among the most misunderstood institutions of American history. The demise of the plantation has been pronounced many times, but the large industrial farms survive as significant parts of, not just the South's, but the nation's agriculture."In this sweeping historical and geographical account, Aiken traces the development of the Southern cotton plantation since the Civil War—from the emergence of tenancy after 1865, through its decline during the Depression, to the post-World War Two development of the large industrial farm. Tracing the geographical changes in plantation agriculture and the plantation regions after 1865, Aiken shows how the altered landscape of the South has led many to the false conclusion that the plantation has vanished. In fact, he explains, while certain regions of the South have reverted to other uses, the cotton plantation survives in a form that is, in many ways, remarkably similar to that of its antebellum predecessors. Aiken also describes the evolving relationship of African-Americans to the cotton plantation during the thirteen decades of economic, social, and political changes from Reconstruction through the War on Poverty—including the impact of alterations in plantation agriculture and the mass migration of Southern blacks to the urban North during the twentieth century. Richly illustrated with more than 130 maps and photographs (many original and many from FSA photographers), The Cotton Plantation South is a vivid and colorful account of landscape, geography, race, politics, and civil rights as they relate to one of America's most enduring and familiar institutions.

The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War

The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War PDF Author: Charles S. Aiken
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421436124
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 602

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the J. B. Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers Originally published in 1998. "The plantation," writes Charles Aiken, "is among the most misunderstood institutions of American history. The demise of the plantation has been pronounced many times, but the large industrial farms survive as significant parts of, not just the South's, but the nation's agriculture."In this sweeping historical and geographical account, Aiken traces the development of the Southern cotton plantation since the Civil War—from the emergence of tenancy after 1865, through its decline during the Depression, to the post-World War Two development of the large industrial farm. Tracing the geographical changes in plantation agriculture and the plantation regions after 1865, Aiken shows how the altered landscape of the South has led many to the false conclusion that the plantation has vanished. In fact, he explains, while certain regions of the South have reverted to other uses, the cotton plantation survives in a form that is, in many ways, remarkably similar to that of its antebellum predecessors. Aiken also describes the evolving relationship of African-Americans to the cotton plantation during the thirteen decades of economic, social, and political changes from Reconstruction through the War on Poverty—including the impact of alterations in plantation agriculture and the mass migration of Southern blacks to the urban North during the twentieth century. Richly illustrated with more than 130 maps and photographs (many original and many from FSA photographers), The Cotton Plantation South is a vivid and colorful account of landscape, geography, race, politics, and civil rights as they relate to one of America's most enduring and familiar institutions.

Homelands

Homelands PDF Author: Richard L. Nostrand
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801876605
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
What does it mean to be from somewhere? If most people in the United States are "from some place else" what is an American homeland? In answering these questions, the contributors to Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America offer a geographical vision of territory and the formation of discrete communities in the U.S. today. Homelands discusses groups such as the Yankees in New England, Old Order Amish in Ohio, African Americans in the plantation South, Navajos in the Southwest, Russians in California, and several other peoples and places. Homelands explores the connection of people and place by showing how aspects of several different North American groups found their niche and created a homeland. A collection of fifteen essays, Homelands is an innovative look at geographical concepts in community settings. It is also an exploration of the academic work taking place about homelands and their people, of how factors such as culture, settlement, and cartographic concepts come together in American sociology. There is much not only to study but also to celebrate about American homelands. As the editors state, "Underlying today's pluralistic society are homelands—large and small, strong and weak—that endure in some way. The mosaic of homelands to which people bonded in greater or lesser degrees, affirms in a holistic way America's diversity, its pluralistic society." The authors depict the cultural effects of immigrant settlement. The conviction that people need to participate in the life of the homeland to achieve their own self realization, within the traditions and comforts of that community. Homelands gives us a new map of the United States, a map drawn with people's lives and the land that is their home.

The Changing American Countryside

The Changing American Countryside PDF Author: Emery N. Castle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
The literature on rural America, to the extent that it exists, has largely been written by urban-based scholars perpetuating out-of-date notions and stereotypes or by those who see little difference between rural and agricultural concerns. As a result, the real rural America remains much misunderstood, neglected, or ignored by scholars and policymakers alike. In response, Emery Castle offers The Changing American Countryside, a volume that will forever change how we look at this important subject. Castle brings together the writings of eminent scholars from several disciplines and varying backgrounds to take a fresh and comprehensive look at the "forgotten hinterlands." These authors examine the role of non-metropolitan people and places in the economic life of our nation and cover such diverse issues as poverty, industry, the environment, education, family, social problems, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, government, public policy, and regional diversity The authors are especially effective in demonstrating why rural America is so much more than just agriculture. It is in fact highly diverse, complex, and interdependent with urban America and the international market place. Most major rural problems, they contend, simply cannot be effectively addressed in isolation from their urban and international connections. To do so is misguided and even hazardous, when one-fourth of our population and ninety-seven per cent of our land area is rural. Together these writings not only provide a new and more realistic view of rural life and public policy, but also suggest how the field of rural studies can greatly enrich our understanding of national life.

Big House on the Prairie

Big House on the Prairie PDF Author: John M. Eason
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022641048X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
For the past fifty years, America has been extraordinarily busy building prisons. Since 1970 we have tripled the total number of facilities, adding more than 1,200 new prisons to the landscape. This building boom has taken place across the country but is largely concentrated in rural southern towns. In 2007, John M. Eason moved his family to Forrest City, Arkansas, in search of answers to key questions about this trend: Why is America building so many prisons? Why now? And why in rural areas? Eason quickly learned that rural demand for prisons is complicated. Towns like Forrest City choose to build prisons not simply in hopes of landing jobs or economic wellbeing, but also to protect and improve their reputations. For some rural leaders, fostering a prison in their town is a means of achieving order in a rapidly changing world. Taking us into the decision-making meetings and tracking the impact of prisons on economic development, poverty, and race, Eason demonstrates how groups of elite whites and black leaders share power. Situating prisons within dynamic shifts that rural economies are undergoing and showing how racially diverse communities lobby for prison construction, Big House on the Prairie is a remarkable glimpse into the ways a prison economy takes shape and operates.

Driven to the Field

Driven to the Field PDF Author: David A. Davis
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813948665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Driven to the Field traces the culture of sharecropping—crucial to understanding life in the southern United States—from Emancipation to the twenty-first century. By reading dozens of works of literature in their historical context, David A. Davis demonstrates how sharecropping emerged, endured for a century, and continues to resonate in American culture. Following the end of slavery, sharecropping initially served as an expedient solution to a practical problem, but it quickly developed into an entrenched power structure situated between slavery and freedom that exploited the labor of Blacks and poor whites to produce agricultural commodities. Sharecropping was the economic linchpin in the South’s social structure, and the region’s political system, race relations, and cultural practices were inextricably linked with this peculiar form of tenant farming from the end of the Civil War through the civil rights movement. Driven to the Field analyzes literary portrayals of this system to explain how it defined the culture of the South, revealing multiple genres of literature that depicted sharecropping, such as cotton romances, agricultural uplift novels, proletarian sharecropper fiction, and sharecropper autobiographies—important works of American literature that have never before been evaluated and discussed in their proper context.

New Patterns of Hispanic Settlement in Rural America

New Patterns of Hispanic Settlement in Rural America PDF Author: William Kandel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hispanic Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description


Rethinking Class and Social Difference

Rethinking Class and Social Difference PDF Author: Barry Eidlin
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1839820209
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This volume draws together scholars rethinking social scientific and theoretical approaches to a wide range of forms of social difference and inequality. These include race, nationalism, sexuality, professional classes, domestic employment, digital communication, and uneven economic development

Persistence and Change in Rural Communities

Persistence and Change in Rural Communities PDF Author: A. E. Luloff
Publisher: CABI
ISBN: 9780851997773
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
In the 1930s and 1940s the US Department of Agriculture undertook detailed studies of six US rural communities representing various patterns of social and economic change that were affecting rural America. These studies became classics in the literature on rural communities, and for the past half-century have helped to develop major theoretical perspectives in community sociology.Fifty years later the same study areas were revisited by a team of rural sociologists, with the goal of assessing what changes have occurred and what community characteristics have persisted. This book assesses these changes in rural life."This volume is an important addition to the sociological literature on rural communities."Willis Goudy, The Agricultural History Review, 2003

Racial/ethnic Minorities in Rural Areas

Racial/ethnic Minorities in Rural Areas PDF Author: Linda L. Swanson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Minorities
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description


Problem of the Century

Problem of the Century PDF Author: Elijah Anderson
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610448391
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
In 1899 the great African American scholar, W.E.B. DuBois, published The Philadelphia Negro, the first systematic case study of an African American community and one of the foundations of American sociology. DuBois prophesied that the color line would be the problem of the twentieth century. One hundred years later, Problem of the Century reflects upon his prophecy, exploring the ways in which the color line is still visible in the labor market, the housing market, education, family structure, and many other aspects of life at the turn of a new century. The book opens with a theoretical discussion of the way racial identity is constructed and institutionalized. When the government classifies races and confers group rights upon them, is it subtly reenforcing damaging racial divisions, or redressing the group privileges that whites monopolized for so long? The book also delineates the social dynamics that underpin racial inequality. The contributors explore the causes and consequences of high rates of mortality and low rates of marriage in black communities, as well as the way race affects a person's chances of economic success. African Americans may soon lose their historical position as America's majority minority, and the book also examines how race plays out in the sometimes fractious relations between blacks and immigrants. The final part of the book shows how the color line manifests itself at work and in schools. Contributors find racial issues at play on both ends of the occupational ladder—among absentee fathers paying child support from their meager earnings and among black executives prospering in the corporate world. In the schools, the book explores how race defines a student's peer group and how peer pressure affects a student's grades. Problem of the Century draws upon the distinguished faculty of sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania, where DuBois conducted his research for The Philadelphia Negro. The contributors combine a scrupulous commitment to empirical inquiry with an eclectic openness to different methods and approaches. Problem of the Century blends ethnographies and surveys, statistics and content analyses, census data and historical records, to provide a far-reaching examination of racial inequality in all its contemporary manifestations.