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James C. Giesen - Land of Cotton, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

Del i serien Environmental History and the American South

Land of Cotton

Culture, Landscape, and the Fabric of Southern History

Av James C. Giesen

2399 kr

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Beskrivning
The Land of Cotton is a sweeping environmental and cultural history of cotton’s power in the American South. More than the region’s signature crop, cotton was a material, symbolic, economic, and ideological force. James C. Giesen’s central claim is that the culture of cotton—the ways planters, laborers, boosters, tourist boards, musicians, and a host of others representing the crop—shifted not only with the political moment but in response to the physical world. Cotton lands eroding and becoming forests, labor and technological upheaval, and the rise and fall of constructed environments all changed the rhetorical possibility of the thin white fiber. Cotton festivals, country songs, and sharecroppers’ memories shaped and were shaped by the conditions of terrains. By grounding this history in two distinct Southern landscapes—the South Carolina Piedmont and the Mississippi Delta—Giesen reveals how these local conditions forged cotton’s cultural power and practical uses. Spanning 150 years, this study shows how the South’s most iconic crop remained a literal and figurative site for debates over environmental change, political ideology, and historical memory.
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JAMES C. GIESEN is a historian specializing in the environmental and agricultural history of the American South. His book Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South was awarded the Deep South Book Prize and the Francis B. Simkins Award, and his articles have won awards from the Agricultural History Society and the Southern Historical Association. Giesen has been named a Gulmon Eminent Scholar by the College of Arts and Sciences at Mississippi State University as well as a John Grisham Master Teacher, the university’s highest teaching honor. He is also a fellow and former president of the Agricultural History Society.

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The sentimental minstrel song 'Dixie' has invited generations of Southerners in exile to 'look away' toward an idealized and whitewashed Southern landscape. In The Land of Cotton, James C. Giesen challenges readers to ditch this nostalgic view, which still exerts a strong grip on the imaginations of people living in the American South. He accounts for why cotton has reigned as a powerful cultural symbol of the region despite its production resting on racist and unequal social relations, and despite its devastating environmental scars on the Southern countryside. Readers will not be able to look away from this fascinating and compelling book.

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