Deep Souths
Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation
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- £25.99
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- £25.99
Publisher Description
Deep Souths tells the stories of three southern regions from Reconstruction to World War II: the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, the eastern Piedmont of Georgia, and the Georgia Sea Islands and Atlantic coast. Though these regions initially shared the histories and populations we associate with the idea of a "Deep South"—all had economies based on slave plantation labor in 1860—their histories diverged sharply during the three generations after Reconstruction. With research gathered from oral histories, census reports, and a wide variety of other sources, Harris traces these regional changes in cumulative stories of individuals across the social spectrum. Deep Souths presents a comparative and ground-level view of history that challenges the idea that the lower South was either uniform or static in the era of segregation. By the end of the New Deal era, changes in these regions had prepared the way for the civil rights movement and the end of segregation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This lucid, scholarly social history of three lower-South regions the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, the eastern Georgia Piedmont, and the Sea Islands and rice coast of Georgia examines three generations after the Reconstruction (1876 1939). Using plantation records, county newspapers, census records, tax returns, oral histories, journals and diaries, Harris (Plain Folks and Gentry in a Slave Society) chronicles economic developments, culture and politics. A history professor at the University of New Hampshire, he challenges the conventional picture of the Deep South as a static and uniform society. "The ebbs and flows of capital and labor" form the bones of Harris's work, while the lives of real people give it vitality women as well as men, poor farmers and wealthy land-owners, Pentecostals and politicians, sharecroppers and educators, lynchers and their victims, suffragists and blues singers, entrepreneurs and activists often rendered in pertinent, vivid biographical detail in this absorbing work, which is based on more than a decade of research. The book concludes with an "Essay on Sources" that should be very useful to fellow researchers, as well as a highly intelligible appendix providing statistical data on population, lynchings, presidential votes, farm ownership, farm production, occupations, marriage and household status, and church membership. (June 13)
