Author: John Otto
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313002290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
An examination of the settlement history of the alluvial bottomlands of the lower Mississippi Valley from 1880 to 1930, this study details how cotton-growers transformed the swamplands of northwestern Mississippi, northeastern Louisiana, northeastern Arkansas, and southern Missouri into cotton fields. Although these alluvial bottomlands contained the richest cotton soils in the American South, cotton-growers in the Southern bottomlands faced a host of environmental problems, including dense forests, seasonal floods, water-logged soils, poor transportation, malarial fevers and insect pests. This interdisciplinary approach uses primary and secondary sources from the fields of history, geography, sociology, agronomy, and ecology to fill an important gap in our knowledge of American environmental history. Requiring laborers to clear and cultivate their lands, cotton-growers recruited black and white workers from the upland areas of the Southern states. Growers also supported the levee districts which built imposing embankments to hold the floodwaters in check. Canals and drainage ditches were constructed to drain the lands, and local railways and graveled railways soon ended the area's isolation. Finally, quinine and patent medicines would offer some relief from the malarial fevers that afflicted bottomland residents, and commercial poisons would combat the local pests that attacked the cotton plants, including the boll weevils which arrived in the early twentieth century.
Author: John Solomon Otto
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alluvial plains
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Mikko Saikku
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340693
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
This environmental history of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta places the Delta's economic and cultural history in an environmental context. It reveals the human aspects of the region's natural history, including land reclamation, slave and sharecropper economies, ethnic and racial perceptions of land ownership and stewardship, and even blues music.
Author: Erin Stewart Mauldin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197563449
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Unredeemed Land examines the ways the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves reconfigured the South's natural landscape, revealing the environmental constraints that shaped the rural South's transition to capitalism during the late nineteenth century.
Author: Christine A Klein
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479856169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Read a free excerpt here! American engineers have done astounding things to bend the Mississippi River to their will: forcing one of its tributaries to flow uphill, transforming over a thousand miles of roiling currents into a placid staircase of water, and wresting the lower half of the river apart from its floodplain. American law has aided and abetted these feats. But despite our best efforts, so-called “natural disasters” continue to strike the Mississippi basin, as raging floodwaters decimate waterfront communities and abandoned towns literally crumble into the Gulf of Mexico. In some places, only the tombstones remain, leaning at odd angles as the underlying soil erodes away. Mississippi River Tragedies reveals that it is seductively deceptive—but horribly misleading—to call such catastrophes “natural.” Authors Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer present a sympathetic account of the human dreams, pride, and foibles that got us to this point, weaving together engaging historical narratives and accessible law stories drawn from actual courtroom dramas. The authors deftly uncover the larger story of how the law reflects and even amplifies our ambivalent attitude toward nature—simultaneously revering wild rivers and places for what they are, while working feverishly to change them into something else. Despite their sobering revelations, the authors’ final message is one of hope. Although the acknowledgement of human responsibility for unnatural disasters can lead to blame, guilt, and liability, it can also prod us to confront the consequences of our actions, leading to a liberating sense of possibility and to the knowledge necessary to avoid future disasters.
Author: Colin Edward Woodward
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1610757777
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Winner, 2023 J. G. Ragsdale Book Award from the Arkansas Historical Association Because Johnny Cash cut his classic singles at Sun Records in Memphis and reigned for years as country royalty from his Nashville-area mansion, people tend to associate the Man in Black with Tennessee. But some of Cash’s best songs—including classics like “Pickin’ Time,” “Big River,” and “Five Feet High and Rising”—sprang from his youth in the sweltering cotton fields of northeastern Arkansas. In Country Boy, Colin Woodward combines biography, history, and music criticism to illustrate how Cash’s experiences in Arkansas shaped his life and work. The grip of the Great Depression on Arkansas’s small farmers, the comforts and tragedies of family, and a bedrock of faith all lent his music the power and authenticity that so appealed to millions. Though Cash left Arkansas as an eighteen-year-old, he often returned to his home state, where he played some of his most memorable and personal concerts. Drawing upon the country legend’s songs and writings, as well as the accounts of family, fellow musicians, and chroniclers, Woodward reveals how the profound sincerity and empathy so central to Cash’s music depended on his maintaining a deep connection to his native Arkansas—a place that never left his soul.
Author: Jarod Roll
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252077032
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Treats the developments in tenant farming communities (black and white) in Missouri's "bootheel" in the 1930s.
Author: Matthew Hild
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
This book is the first devoted entirely to an examination of working-class activism, broadly defined as that of farmers’ organizations, labor unions, and (often biracial) political movements, in Arkansas during the Gilded Age. On one level, Hild argues for the significance of this activism in its own time: had the Arkansas Democratic Party not resorted to undemocratic, unscrupulous, and violent means of repression, the Arkansas Union Labor Party would have taken control of the state government in the election of 1888. He also argues that the significance of these movements lasted beyond their own time, their influence extending into the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union of the 1930s, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and even today’s Farmers’ Union and the United Mine Workers of America. The story of farmer and labor protest in Arkansas during the late nineteenth century offers lessons relevant to contemporary working-class Americans in what some observers have called the “new Gilded Age.”
Author: Mark Schatzker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501192485
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
The international bestseller from award-winning writer Mark Schatzker that reveals how our dysfunctional relationship with food began—and how science is leading us back to healthier living and eating. For the last fifty years, we have been fighting a losing war on food. We have cut fat, reduced carbs, eliminated sugar, and attempted every conceivable diet only to find that eighty-eight million American adults are prediabetic, more than a hundred million have high blood pressure, and nearly half now qualify as obese. The harder we try to control what we eat, the unhealthier we become. Why? Mark Schatzker has spent his career traveling the world in search of the answer. Now, in The End of Craving, he poses the profound question: What if the key to nutrition and good health lies not in resisting the primal urge to eat but in understanding its purpose? Beginning in the mountains of Europe and the fields of the Old South, Schatzker embarks on a quest to uncover the lost art of eating and living well. Along the way, he visits brain scanning laboratories and hog farms, and encounters cultural oddities and scientific paradoxes—northern Italians eat what may be the world’s most delicious cuisine, yet are among the world’s thinnest people; laborers in southern India possess an inborn wisdom to eat their way from sickness to good health. Schatzker reveals how decades of advancements in food technology have turned the brain’s drive to eat against the body, placing us in an unrelenting state of craving. Only by restoring the relationship between nutrition and the pleasure of eating can we hope to lead longer and happier lives. Combining cutting-edge science and ancient wisdom, The End of Craving is an urgent and radical investigation that “charts a roadmap not just for healthy eating, but for joyous eating, too” (Dan Barber, New York Times bestselling author of The Third Plate).
Author: Cindy Grisham
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1625840489
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 131
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Book Description
Up and down the Arkansas Delta, food tells a story. Whether the time Bill Clinton nearly died on the way to a coon dinner or the connections made over biscuits and gravy or the more common chicken and dumpling feuds, the area is no stranger to history. One of America's last frontiers, it was settled in the late nineteenth century by a rough-and-tumble collection of timber men, sharecroppers and entrepreneurs from all over the world who embraced the traditional foodways and added their own twists. Today, the Arkansas Delta is the nation's largest producer of rice and adds other crops like catfish and sweet potatoes. Join author Cindy Grisham for this delicious look into Delta cuisine.
