First Published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

First Published in 1983. Of all the social relationships that exist in the countryside in contemporary poor countries, and which have existed in the past in ‘developed’ countries, that of share tenancy is among the most significant and the most fascinating. It is, and has been, geographically widespread, varied in its manifestations, and historically tenacious. Sharecropping has been singled out frequently in land reform programmes as a candidate for elimination. Yet it persists, often in disguised form. It raises difficult theoretical issues, which have attracted the attention of some of the outstanding economists—from Adam Smith, through John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Alfred Marshall—and which remain contentious. Sharecroppers, moreover, have sometimes been involved in important political movements in the countryside. This, too, has given rise to considerable debate. In this double special number of the Journal of Peasant Studies, these varied issues are given extensive and rigorous treatment within a predominantly political economy framework. Sharecropping and sharecroppers are examined both in general terms, in a number of theoretical contributions, and in a rich variety of regional contexts, in which their specific manifestations emerge.

Winner of the 2019 Humanities Book of the Year from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Today sharecropping is history, though during World War II and the Great Depression sharecropping was prevalent in Louisiana's southern parishes. Sharecroppers rented farmland and often a small house, agreeing to pay a one-third share of all profit from the sale of crops grown on the land. Sharecropping shaped Louisiana's rich cultural history, and while there have been books published about sharecropping, they share a predominately male perspective. In A Cajun Girl's Sharecropping Years, Viola Fontenot adds the female voice into the story of sharecropping. Spanning from 1937 to 1955, Fontenot describes her life as the daughter of a sharecropper in Church Point, Louisiana, including details of field work as well as the domestic arts and Cajun culture. The account begins with stories from early life, where the family lived off a gravel road near the woods without electricity, running water, or bathrooms, and a mule-drawn wagon was the only means of transportation. To gently introduce the reader to her native language, the author often includes French words along with a succinct definition. This becomes an important part of the story as Fontenot attends primary school, where she experienced prejudice for speaking French, a forbidden and punishable act. Descriptions of Fontenot's teenage years include stories of going to the boucherie; canning blackberries, figs, and pumpkins; using the wood stove to cook dinner; washing and ironing laundry; and making moss mattresses. Also included in the texts are explanations of rural Cajun holiday traditions, courting customs, leisure activities, children's games, and Saturday night house dances for family and neighbors, the fais do-do.

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.

A sharecropper's daughter describes her childhood in Texas in the early years of the twentieth century.