Race, class, and community in Southern labor history

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Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries

Emanating from a colloquium held at Louisiana State University entitled "Intertextuality and Civilization in the Americas," this volume features some of the best minds now writing in comparative and interdisciplinary fields. Through lively discussions of topics ranging from Sigmund Freud to Zora Neale Hurston, from Christopher Columbus to the Holocaust, and including latter-day cultural icons such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the contributors create a stimulating dialogue on the crucial role of the poetic imagination in shaping the identity of civilizations. Together, the essays offer a full consideration of cultural identity and bring to the fore the difficult question of the larger responsibilities that identity entails. As Bainard Cowan illustrates in his perceptive introduction, in both the past and the future of the Americas, in moments of foundation as well as of conflict and dispersal, there has been or will be present the recurrent need for mythic and poetic understanding. An unusually timely work, Poetics of the Americas skillfully addresses the crises that the world faces in the confrontations of cultures, traditions, and peoples.

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Carol Lee Bacchi

This book offers an intellectual history of the English-speaking Canadian woman's suffrage movement. It argues that the motivations of a great many suffragists were affected by their membership in a social elite that saw the need to regulate society's future and hoped the family would remain the foundation of that future.

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Christopher Morris

Mississippi, perhaps more than any other state, epitomized the Old South and all it stood for. Yet, at one time, this area had more in common with newly settled northwest territories than it did with older southeastern plantation districts. This book takes a close look at a "typical" Southern community, and traces its long process of economic, social, and cultural evolution. Focusing on Jefferson Davis's Warren County, Morris shows the transformation of a loosely knit Western community of pioneer homesteaders into a distinctly Southern society. This region was first settled by farmers and herders; by the turn of the nineteenth century, the wealthiest residents began to acquire slaves and to plant cotton, hastening the demise of the pioneer economy. Gradually, farmers began producing for the market, which drew them out of their neighborhoods and broke down local patterns of cooperation. Individuals learned to rely on extended kin-networks as a means of acquiring land and slaves, giving tremendous power to older men with legal control over family property. Relations between masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and planters and yeoman farmers changed with the emergence of the traditional patriarchy of the Old South; this transformation created the "Southern" society that Warren County's white residents defended in the Civil War. Drawing on wills, deeds, and court records, as well as manuscript materials, Morris presents a sensitive and nuanced portrait of the interaction between ideology and material conditions, challenging accepted notions of what we have come to understand as Southern culture.

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Christopher J. Smith

Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, critical changes have swept all levels of Chinese society. This text, which views contemporary China from a geographer’s perspective, assesses the questions inherent insuch rapid evolution. how do the Chinese manage to provide enough food for more than a billion people? In what ways are they restructuring and modernizing their economy? How have they been able to provide mass access to such services as health care, education, and housing? The author also delves into the relatively unexplored realm of everyday life in the new China. Why do so many want to leave the countryside and move to the cities? how has life changed for women after centures of Confucian oppression in China? And what does the future hold for China’s many ethnic minority groups?By providing answers to questions such as these, the book illustrates the centrality of geography to the study of China--a country where distance still acts as a major constraint on social and spatial interaction; where the population is so huge that demand for resources almost always outstrips supply; and where regional variations have produced a rich mosaic of human and physical characteristics.