This is the first book-length study of Delta Cooperative Farm (1936–42) and its descendant, Providence Farm (1938–56). The two intentional communities drew on internationalist practices of cooperative communalism and pragmatically challenged Jim Crow segregation and plantation labor. In the winter of 1936, two dozen black and white ex-sharecropping families settled on some two thousand acres in the rural Mississippi Delta, one of the most insular and oppressive regions in the nation. Thus began a twenty-year experiment—across two communities—in interracialism, Christian socialism, cooperative farming, and civil and economic activism. Robert Hunt Ferguson recalls the genesis of Delta and Providence: how they were modeled after cooperative farms in Japan and Soviet Russia and how they rose in reaction to the exploitation of small- scale, dispossessed farmers. Although the staff, volunteers, and residents were very much everyday people—a mix of Christian socialists, political leftists, union organizers, and sharecroppers—the farms had the backing of such leading figures as philanthropist Sherwood Eddy, who purchased the land, and educator Charles Spurgeon Johnson and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who served as trustees. On these farms, residents developed a cooperative economy, operated a desegregated health clinic, held interracial church services and labor union meetings, and managed a credit union. Ferguson tells how a variety of factors related to World War II forced the closing of Delta, while Providence finally succumbed to economic boycotts and outside threats from white racists. Remaking the Rural South shows how a small group of committed people challenged hegemonic social and economic structures by going about their daily routines. Far from living in a closed society, activists at Delta and Providence engaged in a local movement with national and international roots and consequences.

Slave family could assert some measure of independence and perhaps find some degree of spiritual refreshment. Since slavery, working the garden for the survival of the family has become less urgent, but now pleasure is taken from growing flowers and produce and in welcoming friends to the yard. Similarities in attitude between rural southern blacks and whites are reflected in the expression of such values as the importance of the agrarian lifestyle, self-reliance, and.

The rural south is a region in which every part of the past is very much its present. Peter Stitt's collection of photographs are an expressive study of a landscape that can be, at times, both particularly straightforward and subtly peculiar. Each image is a contemporary representation of a memory, a feeling, or a meditation on the small towns of the rural South.

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.

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.

This collection of more than 600 oral histories recalls the Great Depression and provides a rich personal chronicle of the 1930s. The Depression altered the basic structure of American society and changed the way government, business, and the American people interacted. Capturing this historical era and its meaning, the stories in Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South reflect the general despair of the people, but they also reveal the hope many found through the New Deal.

Emphasizing the role of kinship, labor, and networks in the African American community, the author retraces six generations of black struggles since the end of the Civil War, revealing a "nation" under construction.