The Final Frontiers 1880 1930

Author : John Otto
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 1999-09-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780313002298

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The Final Frontiers, 1880-1930 by John Otto Pdf

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 : Eliane Leslau Silverman
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1984
Category : Social Science
ISBN : UVA:X000891398

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The Last Best West by Eliane Leslau Silverman Pdf

"This collection of unusually powerful stories opens up a refreshing new chapter in Canadian history. Since there are so few written records of the lives of frontier women, Dr. Silverman collected 'memories'; the result has the hypnotic appeal of all genuine storytelling. It extends our understanding of Canadian heritage by weaving 'a collective autobiography' of the women who were the earliest settlers in Alberta, the site of the final North American land rush. The true story of how these women created a society from a harsh frontier is heartwarming and inspiring."--Publisher.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : PediaPress
Page : 2631 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2024-06-28
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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The United States of America by Anonim Pdf

Author : Susan Scott Parrish
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 410 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2018-12-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691182940

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The Flood Year 1927 by Susan Scott Parrish Pdf

A richly nuanced cultural history of the Great Mississippi flood The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, drowning crops and displacing more than half a million people across seven states. It was also the first environmental disaster to be experienced virtually on a mass scale. The Flood Year 1927 draws from newspapers, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, vaudeville, blues songs, poetry, and fiction to show how this event provoked an intense and lasting cultural response. Americans at first seemed united in what Herbert Hoover called a "great relief machine," but deep rifts soon arose. Southerners, pointing to faulty federal levee design, decried the attack of Yankee water. The condition of African American evacuees prompted comparisons to slavery from pundits like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. And environmentalists like Gifford Pinchot called the flood "the most colossal blunder in civilized history." Susan Scott Parrish examines how these and other key figures—from entertainers Will Rogers, Miller & Lyles, and Bessie Smith to authors Sterling Brown, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright—shaped public awareness and collective memory of the event. The crises of this period that usually dominate historical accounts are war and financial collapse, but The Flood Year 1927 allows us to assess how mediated environmental disasters became central to modern consciousness.

Author : Mark V. Wetherington
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2021-05-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781442269286

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American Agriculture by Mark V. Wetherington Pdf

American Agriculture tells the story of farming in American from contact between Native Americans and Europeans to the present. Agricultural historian Mark V. Wetherington provide a narrative overview of significant historical trends explored through specific crop regions and their emergence over time. He traces the decline of the family farm that at one time formed the backbone of America’s agrarian culture and the emergence of large industrial farms that overproduce subsidized commodity crops. American Agriculture provides a narrative overview of significant historical trends explored through specific crop regions and their emergence over time. It is interdisciplinary in approach and places the major themes and topics within the broader context of the nation's history. This book will be essential reading to anyone interesting in the past, present, or future of American farming.

Author : R. A. Lawson
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2010-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807146439

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Jim Crow's Counterculture by R. A. Lawson Pdf

In the late nineteenth century, black musicians in the lower Mississippi Valley, chafing under the social, legal, and economic restrictions of Jim Crow, responded with a new musical form -- the blues. In Jim Crow's Counterculture, R. A. Lawson offers a cultural history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black individuality and citizenship. These individuals, Lawson shows, collectively demonstrate the African American struggle during the early twentieth century. Derived from the music of the black working class and popularized by commercially successful songwriter W. C. Handy, early blues provided a counterpoint to white supremacy by focusing on an anti-work ethic that promoted a culture of individual escapism -- even hedonism -- and by celebrating the very culture of sex, drugs, and violence that whites feared. According to Lawson, blues musicians such as Charley Patton and Muddy Waters drew on traditions of southern black music, including call and response forms, but they didn't merely sing of a folk past. Instead, musicians saw blues as a way out of economic subservience. Lawson chronicles the major historical developments that changed the Jim Crow South and thus the attitudes of the working-class blacks who labored in that society. The Great Migration, the Great Depression and New Deal, and two World Wars, he explains, shaped a new consciousness among southern blacks as they moved north, fought overseas, and gained better-paid employment. The "me"-centered mentality of the early blues musicians increasingly became "we"-centered as these musicians sought to enter mainstream American life by promoting hard work and patriotism. Originally drawing the attention of only a few folklorists and music promoters, popular black musicians in the 1940s such as Huddie Ledbetter and Big Bill Broonzy played music that increasingly reached across racial lines, and in the process gained what segregationists had attempted to deny them: the identity of American citizenship. By uncovering the stories of artists who expressed much in their music but left little record in traditional historical sources, Jim Crow's Counterculture offers a fresh perspective on the historical experiences of black Americans and provides a new understanding of the blues: a shared music that offered a message of personal freedom to repressed citizens.

Author : Michele Nacy
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 140 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2000-04-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780313096525

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Members of the Regiment by Michele Nacy Pdf

Many extraordinary women traveled west with their Army officer husbands between 1865 and 1890 and discovered a world that was completely controlled by the United States Army. The Army as a public institution colored virtually every aspect of their domestic lives. Army directives, customs, and traditions imposed social obligations on these women, and the world of the frontier Army garrison continually challenged their sense of what it meant to be true women. Remarkably, they flourished and established a defined role for themselves that went beyond the conventional definition of true womanhood. The shared values, loyalties, and patriotism within the institutional environment of the frontier garrison transcended gender. As distinctly masculine as the Army garrison was perceived to be, the officers' wives shared with their comrades in arms an unequivocal commitment to the Regiment. Because of their presence, the frontier garrison became a much different place to live, as they subtly and slowly changed the very nature of the institution through their efforts to bring some notion of proper society to these rugged circumstances. Unlike most studies, which focus only on farm and frontier women, this volume details the experiences of the women who viewed the world from within garrison walls.

Author : Jeff Singleton
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2000-09-30
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780313000539

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The American Dole by Jeff Singleton Pdf

As Jeff Singleton shows, the rapid expansion of unemployment relief in the early 1930s generated pressures which led to the first federal welfare programs. However the process has received relatively little attention from historians, and unemployment relief does not play a major role in discussions of the current state of welfare. Singleton seeks not only to fill this gap, but to challenge popular interpretations of relief policy in the early 1930s. He shows that relief was expanding prior to the depression and that the modern aspects of social policy implemented in the 1920s profoundly influenced the response of the welfare system to the early stages of the economic crisis. Relief under President Herbert Hoover was neither primarily voluntarist nor traditional. The first full-fledged federal welfare program was implemented under the Hoover administration by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The initial goals of the New Deal's Federal Emergency Relief Administration were to reduce the national relief caseload and the federal welfare role, while improving standards for those on the dole. The institutionalization of state-level welfare was a consequence of the failure of the 1935 reform program (the WPA and the Social Security Act) to eliminate the dole, not a product of conscious liberal policy. Singleton concludes by evaluating the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act in the context of these conclusions. If the dole was not a product of liberal reform, but, instead, arose to fill a policy vacuum, then it will be difficult to eliminate by legislative fiat unless states and the federal government are willing to finance relatively costly alternatives. A provocative analysis of interest to historians and social scientists concerned with American social and labor policy.

Author : Erin Stewart Mauldin
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2018-10-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780190865191

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Unredeemed Land by Erin Stewart Mauldin Pdf

How did the Civil War and the emancipation of four million slaves reconfigure the natural landscape in the South and the farming economy dependent upon it? An innovative reconsideration of the Civil War's profound impact on southern history, Unredeemed Land traces the environmental constraints that shaped the rural South's transition to capitalism during the late nineteenth century. Dixie's "King Cotton" required extensive land use techniques across large swaths of acreage, fresh soil, and slave-based agriculture in order to remain profitable. But wartime destruction and the rise of the contract labor system closed off those possibilities and necessitated increasingly intensive methods of cultivation that worked against the environment. The resulting disconnect between farmers' use of the land and what the natural environment could support intensified the economic dislocation of freed people, poor farmers, and sharecroppers. Erin Stewart Mauldin demonstrates how the Civil War and emancipation accelerated ongoing ecological change in ways that hastened the postbellum collapse of the region's subsistence economy, encouraged the expansion of cotton production, and ultimately kept cotton farmers trapped in a cycle of debt and tenancy. The first environmental history to bridge the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods, Unredeemed Land powerfully examines the ways military conflict and emancipation left enduring ecological legacies.

Author : Abel A. Bartley
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2000-04-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780313030475

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Keeping the Faith by Abel A. Bartley Pdf

An examination of the political and economic power of a large African American community in a segregated southern city; this study attacks the myth that blacks were passive victims of the southern Jim Crow system and reveals instead that in Jacksonville, Florida, blacks used political and economic pressure to improve their situation and force politicians to make moderate adjustments in the Jim Crow system. Bartley tells the compelling story of how African Americans first gained, then lost, then regained political representation in Jacksonville. Between the end of the Civil War and the consolidation of city and county government in 1967, the political struggle was buffeted by the ongoing effort to build an economically viable African American economy in the virulently racist South. It was the institutional complexity of the African American community that ultimately made the protest efforts viable. Black leaders relied on the institutions created during Reconstruction to buttress their social agitation. Black churches, schools, fraternal organizations, and businesses underpinned the civil rights activities of community leaders by supplying the people and the evidence of abuse that inflamed the passions of ordinary people. The sixty-year struggle to break down the door blocking political power serves as an intriguing backdrop to community development efforts. Jacksonville's African American community never accepted their second-class status. From the beginning of their subjugation, they fought to remedy the situation by continuing to vote and run for offices while they developed their economic and social institutions.

Author : Cara Anzilotti
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2002-05-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780313076220

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In the Affairs of the World by Cara Anzilotti Pdf

This book examines how, quite by accident and under very unfortunate circumstances, Britain's colony of South Carolina afforded women an unprecedented opportunity for economic autonomy. Though the colony prospered financially, throughout the colonial period the death rate remained alarmingly high, keeping the white population small. This demographic disruption allowed white women a degree of independence unknown to their peers in most of England's other mainland colonies, for, as heirs of their male relatives, an unusually large proportion of women controlled substantial amounts of real estate. Their economic independence went unchallenged by their male peers because these women never envisioned themselves as anything more than deputies for their husbands, fathers, brothers, and friends. As far as low country settlers were concerned, allowing women to assume the role of planter was necessary to the creation of a traditional, male-centered society in the colony. Fundamentally conservative, women in South Carolina worked to safeguard the patriarchal social order that the area's staggering mortality rate threatened to destroy. Critical to the perpetuation of English culture and patriarchal authority in South Carolina, female planters attended to the affairs of the world and helped to preserve English society in a wilderness setting.

Author : Mark Gibson
Publisher : CRC Press
Page : 684 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2016-04-19
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781439839515

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The Feeding of Nations by Mark Gibson Pdf

In the last decade, the world has grown richer and produced more food than ever before. Yet in that same period, hunger has increased and 925 million remain underfed and malnourished. Exploring this troubling paradox, The Feeding of Nations: Re-Defining Food Security for the 21st Century offers a glimpse into how the simple aspiration of global foo

Author : Matthew Hild
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2018-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780826274182

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Arkansas’s Gilded Age by Matthew Hild Pdf

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 Gibson
Publisher : Academic Press
Page : 564 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2020-02-23
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780128118092

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Food and Society by Mark Gibson Pdf

Food and Society provides a broad spectrum of information to help readers understand how the food industry has evolved from the 20th century to present. It includes information anyone would need to prepare for the future of the food industry, including discussions on the drivers that have, and may, affect food supplies. From a historical perspective, readers will learn about past and present challenges in food trends, nutrition, genetically modified organisms, food security, organic foods, and more. The book offers different perspectives on solutions that have worked in the past, while also helping to anticipate future outcomes in the food supply. Professionals in the food industry, including food scientists, food engineers, nutritionists and agriculturalists will find the information comprehensive and interesting. In addition, the book could even be used as the basis for the development of course materials for educators who need to prepare students entering the food industry. Includes hot topics in food science, such as GMOs, modern agricultural practices and food waste Reviews the role of food in society, from consumption, to politics, economics and social trends Encompasses food safety, security and public health Discusses changing global trends in food preferences

Author : Fred C. Smith
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781617039560

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Trouble in Goshen by Fred C. Smith Pdf

The untold story of three New Deal cooperative farms in the most economically challenged places in the South