Cultivating Success in the South

Louis Ferleger is Professor of History and chair of the History Department at Boston University. He is co-editor, co-author or editor of six books, including Agriculture and National Development: Views on the Nineteenth Century and Slavery, Secession, and Southern History. He is series editor of the Historians in Conversation series published by the University of South Carolina Press and has co-edited a special issue of The Annals devoted to globalization. He has been awarded many fellowships and grants, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an Earhart Fellowship, and a Twentieth Century Fund research grant. John Metz is Director of Archives, Records and Collections at the Library of Virginia. He has more than twenty years of experience in historical research, education, collections management, and programming through his work as an archaeologist, historian and architectural historian for museums and cultural institutions, including the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, the Bermuda National Trust, and the Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier. Metz has written and lectured extensively on Southern history, architecture, and material culture. He holds an MA in Anthropology from the College of William and Mary and a PhD in American Studies from Boston University.

• Introduction: contesting the myth of the backward Southern farmer; 1. Different crops, different cultures: the evolution of three Georgia counties; 2. Land, households, and race in the Georgia Piedmont: the big picture; 3. Production in the Piedmont: more than just cotton; 4. The material world of Piedmont farmers; 5. Investing for success in the Piedmont; Conclusion.

'Ferleger and Metz use an underutilized resource - probate records - to explain household-level production and consumption of yeoman farmers in three Georgia upcountry counties. They supplement probate data with census and Georgia tax data and tell a compelling story about how rural yeoman farmers faced economic and social challenges during the postbellum period. In doing so, they make a worthy contribution to the literature on subsistence farming and postbellum agriculture, introducing historians to a set of underutilized resources that offer details about household behaviors, production, and consumption.' Peggy Hargis, Georgia Southern University