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.

Examining the lives of individuals - freedmen, planters, and merchants - Willis explores the reciprocal interests of former slaves and former slaveholders. He shows how, in a cruel irony replicated in other areas of the South, the backbreaking work that African Americans did to clear, settle, and farm the land away from the river made the land ultimately too valuable for them to retain.

No detailed description available for "Cotton Kingdom of the New South".

A historical document giving a fascinating and stomach turning insight into race relations in the southern United States. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Although it came to epitomize the Cotton South in the twentieth century, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta emerged as a distinct entity in the decades following the Civil War. As other southerners confronted the need to rebuild, the Delta remained mostly wilderness in 1865. Elsewhere, planters struggled to maintain the perquisites of slaveholding and poor families tried desperately to escape the sharecropper's lot, yet Delta landlords offered generous terms to freed people willing to clear and cultivate backcountry acres subject to yellow fever and yearly flooding. By the turn of the century, two-thirds of the region's farmers were African Americans, whose holdings represented great political and economic strength. Most historical studies of the Delta have either lauded the achievements of its white planters or found its record number of lynchings representative of the worst aspects of the New South. By looking beyond white planters to the region as a whole, John C. Willis uncovers surprising evidence of African-American enterprise, the advantages of tenancy in an unstable cotton market, and the dominance of foreign-born merchants in the area, including many Chinese. Examining the lives of individuals--freedmen, planters, and merchants--Willis explores the reciprocal interests of former slaves and former slaveholders. He shows how, in a cruel irony replicated in other areas of the South, the backbreaking work that African Americans did to clear, settle, and farm the land away from the river made the land ultimately too valuable for them to retain. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Delta began to devolve back into a stereotypical southern region with African Americans cast back into an impoverished, debt-ridden labor system. The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta has long been seen as a focal point for the study of Reconstruction, and Forgotten Time enters this historiographical tradition at the same time that it reverses many of its central assumptions.