Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region’s chief cash crop—tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South—as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. Giesen asks how the myth of the boll weevil’s lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region—those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. Boll Weevil Blues brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives in a novel and important way that allows us to reconsider the making of the modern American South.

Published in 1964, A History of Georgia Agriculture describes the early land and labor systems in the state. Agriculture came to Georgia with the first settlers and was largely directed toward the economic self-sufficiency of the British Empire. James C. Bonner's portrayal of the colonial cattle industry is prescient of the later open-range West. He also clearly shows how shortages of horses and implements, poor plowing techniques, and a lack of skill in tool mechanics spawned the cotton-slaves-mules trilogy of antebellum agriculture, which in turn led to land exhaustion and eventual emigration. By the 1850s the general southern desire for economic independence promoted diversification and such scientific farming techniques as crop rotation, contour plowing, and fertilization. Planting of pasture forage to improve livestock and hold soil was advocated and the teaching of agriculture in public schools was promoted. Contemporary descriptions of individual farms and plantations are interspersed to give a picture of day to day farming. Bonner presents a picture of the average Southern farmer of 1850 which is neither that of a landless hireling nor of the traditional planter, but of a practical man trying to make a living.

This collection of fifty-nine primary documents presents multiple viewpoints on more than four centuries of growth, conflict, and change in Georgia. The selections range from a captive's account of a 1597 Indian revolt against Spanish missionaries on the Georgia coast to an impassioned debate in 1992 between county commissioners and environmental activists over a proposed hazardous waste facility in Taylor County. Drawn from such sources as government records, newspapers, oral histories, personal diaries, and letters, the documents give a voice to the concerns and experiences of men and women representing the diverse races, ethnic groups, and classes that, over time, have contributed to the state's history. Cornerstones of Georgia History is especially suited for classroom use, but it provides any concerned citizen of the state with a historical basis on which to form relevant and independent opinions about Georgia's present-day challenges.

Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South. Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these most central social issues. In telling detail Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly underappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America's rise to economic power. When cotton production exploded to satiate the nineteenth-century textile industry's enormous appetite, it became the first truly complex global business and thereby a major driving force in U.S. territorial expansion and sectional economic integration. It propelled New York City to commercial preeminence and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States, providing export capital for the new nation to gain its financial "sea legs" in the world economy. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict at home. Mr. Dattel's skillful historical analysis identifies the commercial forces that cotton unleashed and the pervasive nature of racial antipathy it produced. This is a story that has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of the history of international finance. With 23 black-and-white illustrations.

In this examination of the rise of agrarian radicalism in the late 19th-century South, Hahn focuses on social change and popular consciousness while exploring populism's kinship with other movements such as labour radicalism.

No general history of southern farming since the end of slavery has been published until now. For the first time, Gilbert C. Fite has drawn together the many threads that make up commercial agricultural development in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, to explain why agricultural change was so slow in the South, and then to show how the agents of change worked after 1933 to destroy the old and produce a new agriculture. Fite traces the decline and departure of King Cotton as the hard taskmaster of the region, and the replacement of cotton by a somewhat more democratically rewarding group of farm products: poultry, cattle, swine; soybeans; citrus and other fruits; vegetables; rice; dairy products; and forest products. He shows how such crop changes were related to other developments, such as the rise of a capital base in the South, mainly after World War II; technological innovation in farming equipment; and urbanization and regional population shifts. Based largely upon primary sources, Cotton Fields No More will become the standard work on post-Civil War agriculture in the South. It will be welcomed by students of the American South and of United States agriculture, economic, and social history.