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.

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.