Download or read book Rural Worlds Lost written by Jack Temple Kirby and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1986-12-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immediately following the Civil War, and for many years thereafter, southerners proclaimed a “New” South, implying not only the end of slavery but also the beginning of a new era of growth, industrialization, and prosperity. Time has shown that those declarations—at least in terms of progress and prosperity—were premature by several decades. Life for an Alabama tenant farmer in 1920 did not differ significantly from the life his grandfather led fifty years earlier. In fact, the South remained primarily a land of poor farming folks until the 1940s. Only then, and after World War II, did the real New South of industrial growth and urban development begin to emerge. Jack Temple Kirby’s massive and engaging study examines the rural southern world of the first half of this century, its collapse, and the resulting “modernization” of southern society. The American South was the last region of the Western world to undergo this process, and Rural Worlds Lost is the first book to so thoroughly assess the profound changes modernization has wrought. Kirby painstakingly charts the structural changes in agriculture that have occurred in the South and the effects these changes have had on people both at work and in the community. He is quick to note that there is not just one South but many, emphasizing the South’s diversity not only in terms of race but also in terms of crop type and topography, and the resultant cultural differences of various areas of the region. He also skillfully compares southern life and institutions with those in other parts of the country, noting discrepancies and similarities. Perhaps even more significant, however, is Kirby’s focus on the lives and communities of ordinary people and how they have been transformed by the effects of modernization. By using the oral histories collected by WPA interviewers, Kirby shows firsthand how rural southerners lived in the 1930s and what forces shaped their views on life. He assesses the impact of cash upon traditional rural economies, the revolutionary effects of New Deal programs on the rich and poor, and the forms and cultural results of migration. Kirby also treats home life, recording attitudes toward marriage, and sex, health maintenance, and class relationships, not to mention sports and leisure, moonshining, and the southerner’s longstanding love-hate relationship with the mule. Rural Worlds Lost, based on exceptionally extensive research in archives throughout the South and in federal agricultural censuses, definitively charts the enormous changes that have taken place in the South in this century. Writing about Kirby’s previous book, Media-Made Dixie, Time Magazine noted Kirby’s “scholarship of rare lucidity.” That same high level of scholarship, as well as an undeniable affection for the region, is abundantly evident in this new, path-breaking book.

Download or read book Rural Unwed Mothers written by Mazie Hough and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing extensively from agency records, newspaper accounts, sociological studies and court documents, Hough explores the experiences of rural white unwed mothers in Maine and Tennessee.

Download or read book The Routledge History of Rural America written by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2014. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book Rural Inventions written by Sarah Farmer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-19 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the close of the twentieth century, even as globalization spurred the growth of megacities worldwide, inhabiting the French countryside had become an internationally-shared fantasy and practice. Accounts of moving into old farmhouses were bestsellers, and houses and barns built by peasants had been renovated as second homes throughout the rural hinterland. Such developments, Sarah Farmer argues, did not simply stem from nostalgia for a rural past or a desire to invest in real estate. Rather, they defined new versions of the rural that emerge in post-agrarian societies. In post-World War II France, cutting-edge technological modernization and explosive economic growth uprooted rural populations and eroded the village traditions of a largely peasant nation. And yet, this book argues, rural France did not vanish in the sweeping transformations of the 1950s and 1960s. The French responded to the collapse of peasant society and threats to cherished landscapes by devising new ways of inhabiting the countryside, making them the sites of change and adaptation. In addition to the rise of restored peasant houses as second residences, Rural Inventions explores the utopian experiments in rural communes and in "going back to the land"; environmentalism; the extraordinary success of peasant autobiographies; photography; and other representations through which the French revalorized rural life and landscapes. The peasantry as a social class may have died out, but the countryside persisted, valued as a site not only for agriculture but increasingly for sport and leisure, tourism, social and political engagement, and a natural environment worth protecting. The postwar French state and the nation's rural and urban inhabitants, Sarah Farmer eloquently shows, remade the French countryside in relation to the city and to the world at large, not only invoking traditional France but also creating a vibrant and evolving part of the France yet to come.

Download or read book The Rural Face of White Supremacy written by Mark Roman Schultz and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, The Rural Face of White Supremacy presents a detailed study of the daily experiences of ordinary people in rural Hancock County, Georgia. Drawing on his own interviews with over two hundred black and white residents, Mark Schultz argues that the residents acted on the basis of personal rather than institutional relationships. As a result, Hancock County residents experienced more intimate face-to-face interactions, which made possible more black agency than their urban counterparts were allowed. While they were still firmly entrenched within an exploitive white supremacist culture, this relative freedom did create a space for a range of interracial relationships that included mixed housing, midwifery, church services, meals, and even common-law marriages.

Download or read book African American Life in the Rural South 1900 1950 written by R. Douglas Hurt and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first half of the twentieth century, degradation, poverty, and hopelessness were commonplace for African Americans who lived in the South's countryside, either on farms or in rural communities. Many southern blacks sought relief from these conditions by migrating to urban centers. Many others, however, continued to live in rural areas. Scholars of African American rural history in the South have been concerned primarily with the experience of blacks as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, textile workers, and miners. Less attention has been given to other aspects of the rural African American experience during the early twentieth century. African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950 provides important new information about African American culture, social life, and religion, as well as economics, federal policy, migration, and civil rights. The essays particularly emphasize the efforts of African Americans to negotiate the white world in the southern countryside. Filling a void in southern studies, this outstanding collection provides a substantive overview of the subject. Scholars, students, and teachers of African American, southern, agricultural, and rural history will find this work invaluable.

Download or read book A Doctor for Rural America written by Barbara Barksdale Clowse and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Frances Sage Bradley (1862–1949) was a mediating force between the urban world of her own education and experience, and that of rural Americans. As a widow with four young children, Bradley trained as a doctor and became one of the first women to graduate from Cornell University Medical School. During the height of the Progressive Era, she left her private practice to do significant field work for the newly-created Children's Bureau, working mainly in the Appalachian South. In this timely biography, Barbara Barksdale Clowse details the story of this physician, reformer, and writer, and her efforts to extend access to healthcare to rural communities. Clowse describes Bradley's important innovations in the field of public health, including physical exams or "conferences" for children and infants which simultaneously educated parents and local medical practitioners, and her advocacy for improved nutrition and modern medicine in rural areas. Finally, Clowse illustrates how Bradley's work regarding maternal mortality and morbidity in America was instrumental in demonstrating the need for what became the Sheppard–Towner Act of 1921, also known as the Maternity and Infancy Protection Act. A century has passed since Bradley lived out her commitment to social justice in healthcare, yet many of the issues that she faced still plague the United States today. A Doctor for Rural America presents a balanced portrait of an overlooked pioneer and her work to establish healthcare as an obligation that the government owed to its citizens.

Download or read book Blacks in Rural America written by James Benjamin Stewart and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is unique in its focus on the current economic status of black Americans in rural areas. This topic has had relatively limited visibility in recent years due, in part, to the high degree of urbanization among blacks. However, to neglect rural blacks in the United States would constitute a tremendous disservice both to the legacy of the ongoing struggle of blacks to achieve overall economic parity and to current efforts to ameliorate the particular disadvantages faced by this segment of the American population. Blacks in Rural America will help fill a gap in the literature examining the disadvantaged status of rural blacks. It remedies the lack of information about how the well-being of blacks in rural America is affected by various public policies. This important volume will challenge readers to pay greater attention to the structure of the agrarian sector of the population as such. It is a necessary addition to the libraries of economists, political scientists, sociologists, and scholars of black studies.

Download or read book American Dreams Rural Realities written by Peggy F. Barlett and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws on the stories and words of over a hundred farm families in an average county in Georgia's prime agricultural region to construct an account of the disaster years and their consequences.

Download or read book Dardanelle and the Bottoms written by Mildred D. Gleason and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1819 and 1970, the town of Dardanelle, Arkansas, located on the south side of the Arkansas River in Yell County, Arkansas, experienced sustained prosperity and growth made possible by the nearby farming community known as the Dardanelle Bottoms. A reciprocal relationship between the town and the Bottoms formed the economic backbone on which the area’s well-being was balanced. The country people came to town on Saturdays to buy their groceries and supplies, to shop and take in a movie or visit the pool halls or barbershops. Merchants relied heavily on this country trade and had a long history of extending credit, keeping prices reasonable, and offering respect and appreciation to their customers. This interdependence, stable for decades, began to unravel in the late 1940s with changes in farming, particularly the cotton industry. In Dardanelle and the Bottoms, Mildred Diane Gleason explores this complex rural/town dichotomy, revealing and analyzing key components of each area, including aspects of race, education, the cotton economy and its demise, the devastation of floods and droughts, leisure, crime, and the impact of the Great Depression.

Download or read book South Carolina Women written by Marjorie Julian Spruill and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering an era from the early twentieth century to the present, this volume features twenty-seven South Carolina women of varied backgrounds whose stories reflect the ever-widening array of activities and occupations in which women were engaged in a transformative era that included depression, world wars, and dramatic changes in the role of women. Some striking revelations emerge from these biographical portraits--in particular, the breadth of interracial cooperation between women in the decades preceding the civil rights movement and ways that women carved out diverse career opportunities, sometimes by breaking down formidable occupational barriers. Some women in the volume proceeded cautiously, working within the norms of their day to promote reform even as traditional ideas about race and gender held powerful sway. Others spoke out more directly and forcefully and demanded change. Most of the women featured in these essays were leaders within their respective communities and the state. Many of them, such as Wil Lou Gray, Hilla Sheriff, and Ruby Forsythe, dedicated themselves to improving the quality of education and health care for South Carolinians. Septima Clark, Alice Spearman Wright, Modjeska Simkins, and many others sought to improve conditions and obtain social justice for African Americans. Others, including Victoria Eslinger and Tootsie Holland, were devoted to the cause of women's rights. Louise Smith, Mary Elizabeth Massey, and Mary Blackwell Butler entered traditionally male-dominated fields, while Polly Woodham and Mary Jane Manigault created their own small businesses. A few, including Mary Gordon Ellis, Dolly Hamby, and Harriet Keyserling exercised political influence. Familiar figures like Jean Toal, current chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, are included, but readers also learn about lesser-known women such as Julia and Alice Delk, sisters employed in the Charleston Naval Yard during World War II.

Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture written by Larry J. Griffin and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture offers a timely, authoritative, and interdisciplinary exploration of issues related to social class in the South from the colonial era to the present. With introductory essays by J. Wayne Flynt and by editors Larry J. Griffin and Peggy G. Hargis, the volume is a comprehensive, stand-alone reference to this complex subject, which underpins the history of the region and shapes its future. In 58 thematic essays and 103 topical entries, the contributors explore the effects of class on all aspects of life in the South--its role in Indian removal, the Civil War, the New Deal, and the civil rights movement, for example, and how it has been manifested in religion, sports, country and gospel music, and matters of gender. Artisans and the working class, indentured workers and steelworkers, the Freedmen's Bureau and the Knights of Labor are all examined. This volume provides a full investigation of social class in the region and situates class concerns at the center of our understanding of Southern culture.

Download or read book Working the Garden written by William Conlogue and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-01-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1860 farmers accounted for 60 percent of the American workforce; in 1910, 30.5 percent; by 1994, there were too few to warrant a separate census category. The changes wrought by the decline of family farming and the rise of industrial agribusiness typically have been viewed through historical, economic, and political lenses. But as William Conlogue demonstrates, some of the most vital and incisive debates on the subject have occurred in a site that is perhaps less obvious--literature. Conlogue refutes the critical tendency to treat farm-centered texts as pastorals, arguing that such an approach overlooks the diverse ways these works explore human relationships to the land. His readings of works by Willa Cather, Ruth Comfort Mitchell, John Steinbeck, Luis Valdez, Ernest Gaines, Jane Smiley, Wendell Berry, and others reveal that, through agricultural narratives, authors have addressed such wide-ranging subjects as the impact of technology on people and land, changing gender roles, environmental destruction, and the exploitation of migrant workers. In short, Conlogue offers fresh perspectives on how writers confront issues whose site is the farm but whose impact reaches every corner of American society.

Download or read book The Rural World 1780 1850 written by Pamela Horn and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover page -- Halftitle page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Contents -- Illustrations and tables -- AcknowledgementsI -- The rural community at the end of the eighteenth century -- 2 The pressures of war -- 3 The post-war world -- 4 The relief of the poor -- 5 Village institutions -- 6 Crime and punishment -- 7 Politics and protectionism: 1830s-1850s -- 8 The rural community in the mid nineteenth century -- Appendix 1 Labouring people's budgets in the 1780s -- Appendix 2 Paternalism andsocial policy on the landed estate: Wrest Park, Bedfordshire, in the early nineteenthcentury -- Appendix 3 Extracts from the diary of the Rev. W.C. Risley, vicar of Deddington, for 1838 -- Appendix 4 Labouring people's budgets in the 1840s and 1850s -- Notes and References -- Bibliography -- I ndex

Download or read book Poquosin written by Jack Temple Kirby and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Temple Kirby charts the history of the low country between the James River in Virginia and Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. The Algonquian word for this country, which means 'swamp-on-a-hill,' was transliterated as 'poquosin' by seventeenth-century English settlers. Interweaving social, political, economic, and military history with the story of the landscape, Kirby shows how Native American, African, and European peoples have adapted to and modified this Tidewater area in the nearly four hundred years since the arrival of Europeans. Kirby argues that European settlement created a lasting division of the region into two distinct zones often in conflict with each other: the cosmopolitan coastal area, open to markets, wealth, and power because of its proximity to navigable rivers and sounds, and a more isolated hinterland, whose people and their way of life were gradually--and grudgingly--subjugated by railroads, canals, and war. Kirby's wide-ranging analysis of the evolving interaction between humans and the landscape offers a unique perspective on familiar historical subjects, including slavery, Nat Turner's rebellion, the Civil War, agricultural modernization, and urbanization.

Download or read book Appalachia in the Making written by Mary Beth Pudup and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Appalachia first entered the American consciousness as a distinct region in the decades following the Civil War. The place and its people have long been seen as backwards and 'other' because of their perceived geographical, social, and economic isolation.

Download or read book From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt written by Bruce J. Schulman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt investigates the effects of federal policy on the American South from 1938 until 1980 and charts the close relationship between federal efforts to reform the South and the evolution of activist government in the modern United States. Decrying the South's economic backwardness and political conservatism, the Roosevelt Administration launched a series of programs to reorder the Southern economy in the 1930s. After 1950, however, the social welfare state had been replaced by the national security state as the South's principal benefactor. Bruce J. Schulman contrasts the diminished role of national welfare initiatives in the postwar South with the expansion of military and defense-related programs. He analyzes the contributions of these growth-oriented programs to the South's remarkable economic expansion, to the development of American liberalism, and to the excruciating limits of Sunbelt prosperity, ultimately relating these developments to southern politics and race relations. By linking the history of the South with the history of national public policy, Schulman unites two issues that dominate the domestic history of postwar America--the emergence of the Sunbelt and the expansion of federal power over the nation's economic and social life. A forcefully argued work, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, originally published in 1991(Oxford University Press), will be an important guide to students and scholars of federal policy and modern Southern history.