The Most Southern Place on Earth
The Most Southern Place on Earth

Author: James C. Cobb

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1994-08-04

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780199762439

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"Cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed," Rupert Vance called it in 1935. "Nowhere but in the Mississippi Delta," he said, "are antebellum conditions so nearly preserved." This crescent of bottomlands between Memphis and Vicksburg, lined by the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, remains in some ways what it was in 1860: a land of rich soil, wealthy planters, and desperate poverty--the blackest and poorest counties in all the South. And yet it is a cultural treasure house as well--the home of Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Charley Pride, Walker Percy, Elizabeth Spencer, and Shelby Foote. Painting a fascinating portrait of the development and survival of the Mississippi Delta, a society and economy that is often seen as the most extreme in all the South, James C. Cobb offers a comprehensive history of the Delta, from its first white settlement in the 1820s to the present. Exploring the rich black culture of the Delta, Cobb explains how it survived and evolved in the midst of poverty and oppression, beginning with the first settlers in the overgrown, disease-ridden Delta before the Civil War to the bitter battles and incomplete triumphs of the civil rights era. In this comprehensive account, Cobb offers new insight into "the most southern place on earth," untangling the enigma of grindingly poor but prolifically creative Mississippi Delta.

The Most Southern Place on Earth
The Most Southern Place on Earth

Author: James Charles Cobb

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 9780195045406

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In this comprehensive account, Cobb offers new insight into 'the most southern place on earth, ' untangling the enigma of the grinding poor but prolifically creative Mississippi Delta.

South to A New Place
South to A New Place

Author: Suzanne W. Jones

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780807128404

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Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth. In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains one of the key goals of the book: to open up to scrutiny the literary and cultural practice that has come to be known as “regionalism.” Part I, “Surveying the Territory,” theorizes definitions of place and region, and includes an analysis of southern literary regionalism from the 1930s to the present and an exploration of southern popular culture. In “Mapping the Region,” essayists examine different representations of rural landscapes and small towns, cities and suburbs, as well as liminal zones in which new immigrants make their homes. Reflecting the contributors’ transatlantic perspective, “Making Global Connections” challenges notions of southern distinctiveness by reading the region through the comparative frameworks of Southern Italy, East Germany, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and via a range of texts and contexts—from early reconciliation romances to Faulkner’s fictions about race to the more recent parody of southern mythmaking, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. Together, these essays explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism toward a “new place” in southern studies.

Speed, Safety, and Comfort
Speed, Safety, and Comfort

Author: James John Hoogerwerf

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2023-10-11

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 0807181234

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In Speed, Safety, and Comfort: The Origins of Delta Air Lines, former Delta Boeing 767 captain and aviation historian James John Hoogerwerf traces the evolution and growth of one of America’s most successful airlines. Delta’s story began during the early twentieth century with the fight against the cotton-devouring boll weevil, which devastated the southern economy and compelled scientists to formulate calcium arsenate powder to eradicate the invasive pest. To aid in the elimination effort, Huff Daland Company, a military aircraft manufacturer, constructed the first plane specifically designed to dispense the poison from the air. Crop dusting proved so effective, Huff Daland Dusters, the world’s first crop-dusting company, rebranded as Delta Air Service in 1928 to focus more on providing commercial services, including the transport of passengers and air mail. The following year Delta began flying its first passengers from Monroe, Louisiana, eventually establishing routes across the southeastern United States. By the eve of World War II, the firm had assumed the familiar Delta Air Lines name and boasted forward-thinking management, a modern fleet of aircraft, and increased revenue from passenger ticket sales. Now headquartered in Atlanta, Delta counts itself among the oldest and largest airlines in the world, with nearly 90,000 employees and more than 5,400 flights per day. Delta’s expansion and survival are anomalies in an industry historically dominated by government and special interests. Hoogerwerf’s masterful history of Delta’s beginnings underscores the company’s contribution to agriculture, southern industrialization, and the development of commercial aviation in the United States.

Water Tossing Boulders
Water Tossing Boulders

Author: Adrienne Berard

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2016-10-18

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0807033545

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A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never told On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be “colored”; the school was for whites. This event would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools, an astonishing thirty years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Unearthing one of the greatest stories never told, journalist Adrienne Berard recounts how three unlikely heroes sought to shape a new South. A poor immigrant from southern China, Jeu Gong Lum came to America with the hope of a better future for his family. Unassuming yet boldly determined, his daughter Martha would inhabit that future and become the face of the fight to integrate schools. Earl Brewer, their lawyer and staunch ally, was once a millionaire and governor of Mississippi. When he took the family’s case, Brewer was both bankrupt and a political pariah—a man with nothing left to lose. By confronting the “separate but equal” doctrine, the Lum family fought for the right to educate Chinese Americans in the white schools of the Jim Crow South. Using their groundbreaking lawsuit as a compass, Berard depicts the complicated condition of racial otherness in rural Southern society. In a sweeping narrative that is both epic and intimate, Water Tossing Boulders evokes a time and place previously defined by black and white, a time and place that, until now, has never been viewed through the eyes of a forgotten third race. In vivid prose, the Mississippi Delta, an empire of cotton and a bastion of slavery, is reimagined to reveal the experiences of a lost immigrant community. Through extensive research in historical documents and family correspondence, Berard illuminates a vital, forgotten chapter of America’s past and uncovers the powerful journey of an oppressed people in their struggle for equality.

William Alexander Percy
William Alexander Percy

Author: Benjamin E. Wise

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2012-03-12

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0807869953

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In this evocative biography, Benjamin E. Wise presents the singular life of William Alexander Percy (1885-1942), a queer plantation owner, poet, and memoirist from Mississippi. Though Percy is best known as a conservative apologist of the southern racial order, in this telling Wise creates a complex and surprising portrait of a cultural relativist, sexual liberationist, and white supremacist. We follow Percy as he travels from Mississippi around the globe and, always, back again to the Delta. Wise's exploration brings depth and new meaning to Percy's already compelling life story--his prominent family's troubled history, his elite education and subsequent soldiering in World War I, his civic leadership during the Mississippi River flood of 1927, his mentoring of writers Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, and the writing and publication of his classic autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee. This biography sets Percy's life and search for meaning in the context of his history in the Deep South and his experiences in the gay male world of the early twentieth century. In Wise's hands, these seemingly disparate worlds become one.

A Sphinx on the American Land
A Sphinx on the American Land

Author: Peter Kolchin

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2003-04-01

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 9780807128664

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One reason that the South attracts so much interest is that its history inevitably involves big questions—continuity versus change, slavery and freedom, the meaning of “race,” the formation of national identity, the struggle between local and centralized authority. Because these issues are central to human experience, southern history properly conceived is of more than regional interest. In A Sphinx on the American Land, Peter Kolchin explores three comparative frameworks for the study of the nineteenth-century South in an effort to nudge the subject away from provincialism and toward the kind of global concerns that are already transforming it into one of the most innovative fields of historical research. The volume opens with a comparison between the South and the North, or what Kolchin terms the “un-South.” This basic context, he explains, provides an essential backdrop for understanding the South; how one conceptualizes “southernness” has meaning only in terms of what it is not. Turning to the cohesion and variations among what he calls the “many Souths,” Kolchin reminds us that there has never been one South or archetypal southerner. Internal distinctions—whether geographic, class, religious, or racial—ultimately raise the question of whether one can properly speak of “the” South at all. Finally, Kolchin explores parallels between the South and regions outside the United States—or “other Souths.” He considers a number of ways in which the South can be studied in a broad international setting, paying particular attention to the similarities and differences between the emancipation of southern slaves and Russian serfs. In an eloquent afterword, he ponders the nature and importance of comparative history. Kolchin examines how scholars have approached each of his comparative frameworks and how they might do so in the future, making A Sphinx on the American Land at once a work of history and of historiography. Illustrating the ways in which southern history is also American history and world history, this elegant, profound volume proves Kolchin to be one of the stellar southern historians of his generation.

The Flood Year 1927
The Flood Year 1927

Author: Susan Scott Parrish

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0691182949

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A richly nuanced cultural history of the Great Mississippi flood The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, drowning crops and displacing more than half a million people across seven states. It was also the first environmental disaster to be experienced virtually on a mass scale. The Flood Year 1927 draws from newspapers, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, vaudeville, blues songs, poetry, and fiction to show how this event provoked an intense and lasting cultural response. Americans at first seemed united in what Herbert Hoover called a "great relief machine," but deep rifts soon arose. Southerners, pointing to faulty federal levee design, decried the attack of Yankee water. The condition of African American evacuees prompted comparisons to slavery from pundits like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. And environmentalists like Gifford Pinchot called the flood "the most colossal blunder in civilized history." Susan Scott Parrish examines how these and other key figures—from entertainers Will Rogers, Miller & Lyles, and Bessie Smith to authors Sterling Brown, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright—shaped public awareness and collective memory of the event. The crises of this period that usually dominate historical accounts are war and financial collapse, but The Flood Year 1927 allows us to assess how mediated environmental disasters became central to modern consciousness.

No Depression in Heaven
No Depression in Heaven

Author: Alison Collis Greene

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0199371873

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Nowhere was the transition from church-based aid to federal welfare state brought about by the Great Depression more dramatic than in the South. For a moment, the southern Protestant establishment turned to face the suffering that plantation capitalism pushed behind its image of planter's hatsand hoopskirts. When starving white farmers marched into an Arkansas town to demand food for their dying children and when priests turned away hungry widows and orphans because they were no needier than anyone else, southern clergy of both races spoke with one voice to say that they had done allthey could. It was time for a higher power to intervene. They looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt.When Roosevelt promised a new deal for the "forgotten man," Americans cheered, and when he took office, churches and private agencies gratefully turned much of the responsibility for welfare and social reform over to the state. Yet, argues historian Allison Collis Greene, Roosevelt's New Dealthreatened plantation capitalism even while bending to it. Black southern churches worked to secure benefits for their own communities while white churches divided over loyalties to Roosevelt and Jim Crow. Frustrated by their failure and fractured by divisions over the New Deal, leaders in the majorwhite Protestant denominations surrendered their moral authority in the South. Although the Protestant establishment retained a central role in American life for decades after the Depression, its slip from power made room for upstart Pentecostals and independent evangelicals, who emphasized personalrather than social salvation.

On and Off the Page
On and Off the Page

Author: Ari J. Adipurwawidjana

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1443809381

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This collection of essays, comprised of research first presented at the seventh annual Louisiana Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture, explores one of the most pervasive, vexing, and alluring concepts in the Humanities, that of place. Including essays which encompass a broad range of research fields and methodologies, from Geography to Cybernetics, it presents a cross-section of approaches aimed revealing the complex cultural machinations behind what once may have seemed a static, one-dimensional topic. Investigations into the function of place as a force in contemporary culture inevitably reveal a long history of the interplay between place and cultural product, between 'context' and 'text'. Just as traditional cultures mythologize sacred spaces, so too has Western culture sanctified its own places through its literature. Imagined places such as Faulker’s Yoknapatawpha or Joyce’s Dublin become the focus of conferences and festivals; authors’ homes, birthplaces, and gravesites are transformed into sites of pilgrimage; locales created for television shows and movies become actual businesses catering to a public for whom the line between fantasy and reality is increasingly blurred; and persisting through the great cultural shifts of the past two hundred years is the popular and romantic notion that words, performances, narratives, and even national identities are always in some way an expression of the places in which they are created and set. With the idea of place foregrounded in so much contemporary discourse, this collection promises to enter into an already lively debate and one which, due to its relevance to where we live and how we make sense of our own “places” within them, does not show any signs of flagging.