Rural Worlds Lost

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.

Drawing extensively from agency records, newspaper accounts, sociological studies and court documents, Hough explores the experiences of rural white unwed mothers in Maine and Tennessee.

The Routledge History of Rural America charts the course of rural life in the United States, raising questions about what makes a place rural and how rural places have shaped the history of the nation. Bringing together leading scholars to analyze a wide array of themes in rural history and culture, this text is a state-of-the-art resource for students, scholars, and educators at all levels. This Routledge History provides a regional context for understanding change in rural communities across America and examines a number of areas where the history of rural people has deviated from the American mainstream. Readers will come away with an enhanced understanding of the interplay between urban and rural areas, a knowledge of the regional differences within the rural United States, and an awareness of the importance of agriculture and rural life to American society. The book is divided into four main sections: regions of rural America, rural lives in context, change and development, and resources for scholars and teachers. Examining the essays on the regions of rural America, readers can discover what makes New England different from the South, and why the Midwest and Mountain West are quite different places. The chapters on rural lives provide an entrée into the social and cultural history of rural peoples – women, children and men – as well as a description of some of the forces shaping rural communities, such as immigration, race and religious difference. Chapters on change and development examine the forces molding the countryside, such as rural-urban tensions, technological change and increasing globalization. The final section will help scholars and educators integrate rural history into their research, writing, and classrooms. By breaking the field of rural history into so many pieces, this volume adds depth and complexity to the history of the United States, shedding light on an understudied aspect of the American mythology and beliefs about the American dream.

At the close of the twentieth century, even as globalization spurred the growth of megacities worldwide, inhabiting the French countryside had become an internationally-shared fantasy and practice. Accounts of moving into old farmhouses were bestsellers, and houses and barns built by peasants had been renovated as second homes throughout the rural hinterland. Such developments, Sarah Farmer argues, did not simply stem from nostalgia for a rural past or a desire to invest in real estate. Rather, they defined new versions of the rural that emerge in post-agrarian societies. In post-World War II France, cutting-edge technological modernization and explosive economic growth uprooted rural populations and eroded the village traditions of a largely peasant nation. And yet, this book argues, rural France did not vanish in the sweeping transformations of the 1950s and 1960s. The French responded to the collapse of peasant society and threats to cherished landscapes by devising new ways of inhabiting the countryside, making them the sites of change and adaptation. In addition to the rise of restored peasant houses as second residences, Rural Inventions explores the utopian experiments in rural communes and in "going back to the land"; environmentalism; the extraordinary success of peasant autobiographies; photography; and other representations through which the French revalorized rural life and landscapes. The peasantry as a social class may have died out, but the countryside persisted, valued as a site not only for agriculture but increasingly for sport and leisure, tourism, social and political engagement, and a natural environment worth protecting. The postwar French state and the nation's rural and urban inhabitants, Sarah Farmer eloquently shows, remade the French countryside in relation to the city and to the world at large, not only invoking traditional France but also creating a vibrant and evolving part of the France yet to come.

Now in paperback, The Rural Face of White Supremacy presents a detailed study of the daily experiences of ordinary people in rural Hancock County, Georgia. Drawing on his own interviews with over two hundred black and white residents, Mark Schultz argues that the residents acted on the basis of personal rather than institutional relationships. As a result, Hancock County residents experienced more intimate face-to-face interactions, which made possible more black agency than their urban counterparts were allowed. While they were still firmly entrenched within an exploitive white supremacist culture, this relative freedom did create a space for a range of interracial relationships that included mixed housing, midwifery, church services, meals, and even common-law marriages.

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.

Dr. Frances Sage Bradley (1862–1949) was a mediating force between the urban world of her own education and experience, and that of rural Americans. As a widow with four young children, Bradley trained as a doctor and became one of the first women to graduate from Cornell University Medical School. During the height of the Progressive Era, she left her private practice to do significant field work for the newly-created Children's Bureau, working mainly in the Appalachian South. In this timely biography, Barbara Barksdale Clowse details the story of this physician, reformer, and writer, and her efforts to extend access to healthcare to rural communities. Clowse describes Bradley's important innovations in the field of public health, including physical exams or "conferences" for children and infants which simultaneously educated parents and local medical practitioners, and her advocacy for improved nutrition and modern medicine in rural areas. Finally, Clowse illustrates how Bradley's work regarding maternal mortality and morbidity in America was instrumental in demonstrating the need for what became the Sheppard–Towner Act of 1921, also known as the Maternity and Infancy Protection Act. A century has passed since Bradley lived out her commitment to social justice in healthcare, yet many of the issues that she faced still plague the United States today. A Doctor for Rural America presents a balanced portrait of an overlooked pioneer and her work to establish healthcare as an obligation that the government owed to its citizens.

This volume is unique in its focus on the current economic status of black Americans in rural areas. This topic has had relatively limited visibility in recent years due, in part, to the high degree of urbanization among blacks. However, to neglect rural blacks in the United States would constitute a tremendous disservice both to the legacy of the ongoing struggle of blacks to achieve overall economic parity and to current efforts to ameliorate the particular disadvantages faced by this segment of the American population. Blacks in Rural America will help fill a gap in the literature examining the disadvantaged status of rural blacks. It remedies the lack of information about how the well-being of blacks in rural America is affected by various public policies. This important volume will challenge readers to pay greater attention to the structure of the agrarian sector of the population as such. It is a necessary addition to the libraries of economists, political scientists, sociologists, and scholars of black studies.

Booklist Editors’ Choice “Best Books of 2019” An intimate portrait of the joys and hardships of rural life, as one man searches for community, equality, and tradition in Appalachia Charles D. Thompson, Jr. was born in southwestern Virginia into an extended family of small farmers. Yet as he came of age he witnessed the demise of every farm in his family. Over the course of his own life of farming, rural education, organizing, and activism, the stories of his home place have been his constant inspiration, helping him identify with the losses of others and to fight against injustices. In Going Over Home, Thompson shares revelations and reflections, from cattle auctions with his grandfather to community gardens in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky, racial disparities of white and Black landownership in the South to recent work with migrant farm workers from Latin America. In this heartfelt first-person narrative, Thompson unpacks our country’s agricultural myths and addresses the history of racism and wealth inequality and how they have come to bear on our nation’s rural places and their people.

Between 1819 and 1970, the town of Dardanelle, Arkansas, located on the south side of the Arkansas River in Yell County, Arkansas, experienced sustained prosperity and growth made possible by the nearby farming community known as the Dardanelle Bottoms. A reciprocal relationship between the town and the Bottoms formed the economic backbone on which the area’s well-being was balanced. The country people came to town on Saturdays to buy their groceries and supplies, to shop and take in a movie or visit the pool halls or barbershops. Merchants relied heavily on this country trade and had a long history of extending credit, keeping prices reasonable, and offering respect and appreciation to their customers. This interdependence, stable for decades, began to unravel in the late 1940s with changes in farming, particularly the cotton industry. In Dardanelle and the Bottoms, Mildred Diane Gleason explores this complex rural/town dichotomy, revealing and analyzing key components of each area, including aspects of race, education, the cotton economy and its demise, the devastation of floods and droughts, leisure, crime, and the impact of the Great Depression.