One of the most notable agencies of the New Deal era, the Tennessee Valley Authority was created with a warrant to plan for the socioeconomic improvement of "forgotten" Americans. The construction of the Norris Dam, it was thought, would benefit the region socially as well as economically. This book analyzes and assesses TVA's social experiment in modernization at the grassroots level, using population removal in the Norris Basin as a test case.
Examines the role of press coverage in promoting the mission of the TVA, facilitating family relocation, and formulating the historical legacy of the New Deal For poverty-stricken families in the Tennessee River Valley during the Great Depression, news of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal plans to create the Tennessee Valley Authority--bringing the promise of jobs, soil conservation, and electricity--offered hope for a better life. The TVA dams would flood a considerable amount of land on the riverbanks, however, forcing many families to relocate. In exchange for this sacrifice for the "greater good," these families were promised "fair market value" for their land. As the first geographic location to benefit from the electricity provided by TVA, the people of North Alabama had much to gain, but also much to lose. In The Greater Good: Media, Family Removal, and TVA Dam Construction in North Alabama Laura Beth Daws and Susan L. Brinson describe the region's preexisting conditions, analyze the effects of relocation, and argue that local newspapers had a significant impact in promoting the TVA's agenda. The authors contend that it was principally through newspapers that local residents learned about the TVA and the process and reasons for relocation. Newspapers of the day encouraged regional cooperation by creating an overwhelmingly positive image of the TVA, emphasizing its economic benefits and disregarding many of the details of removal. Using mostly primary research, the volume addresses two key questions: What happened to relocated families after they sacrificed their homes, lifestyles, and communities in the name of progress? And what role did mediated communication play in both the TVA's family relocation process and the greater movement for the public to accept the TVA's presence in their lives? The Greater Good offers a unique window into the larger impact of the New Deal in the South. Until now, most research on the TVA was focused on organizational development rather than on families, with little attention paid to the role of the media in garnering acceptance of a government-enforced relocation.
Traditionally, the TVA has been viewed as a unique response to special circumstances, largely lacking in historical precedents. Countering this assumption, Creese reveals the varied political, social, architectural, and technical currents that directly shaped the TVA vision, which he calls the largest, most optimistic, most skillful, planning project ever undertaken. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This is a study of TVA management of Tellico Dam. Part of the ambitious New Deal project to bring modernity to Appalachia, TVA planning was far-reaching, often far-sighted, but also controversial, involving mass migration of people from their ancestral homes and threats to species, like the snail darter.
Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians In the years after World War I, Southern farm women found their world changing. A postwar plunge in farm prices stretched into a twenty-year agricultural depression and New Deal programs eventually transformed the economy. Many families left their land to make way for larger commercial farms. New industries and the intervention of big government in once insular communities marked a turning point in the struggle of upcountry women—forcing new choices and the redefinition of traditional ways of life. Melissa Walker's All We Knew Was to Farm draws on interviews, archives, and family and government records to reconstruct the conflict between rural women and bewildering and unsettling change. Some women adapted by becoming partners in farm operations, adopting the roles of consumers and homemakers, taking off-farm jobs, or leaving the land. The material lives of rural upcountry women improved dramatically by midcentury—yet in becoming middle class, Walker concludes, the women found their experiences both broadened and circumscribed.
Focusing on the mountainous area from northern Alabama to West Virginia, this important volume explores the historic and contemporary interrelations between culture and environment in a region that has been plagued by land misuse and damaging stereotypes of its people. Committed to taking account of humankind's place in the environment, this collection is a timely contribution to debates over land use and conservation. Debunking the nature/culture dichotomy, contributors examine how physical space is transformed into culturally constituted "place" by a variety of factors, both tangible (architecture, landmarks, artifacts) and intangible (a sense of place, long-term family habitation of land, tradition, "a way of life worth fighting for"). Archaeologists, cultural geographers, and ethnographers examine how the land was used by its earliest inhabitants and trace the effects of agricultural decline, industrial development, and tourism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Powerful case studies recount past displacement of local populations in the name of progress or conservation and track threatened communities' struggles to maintain their claims to place in the face of extralocal counterclaims that would appropriate space and resources for other purposes, such as mountaintop removal of coal or a power company's plans to export electricity from Appalachia to distant urban centers. Contributors also record successful community planning ventures that have achieved creative solutions to seemingly intransigent conflicts between demands for economic wealth and environmental health.
