A book by a heroic sociologist, Arthur Raper, concerns the living conditions of poor farmers in a Georgia county in the early 1930s. Where Dorothea Lange saw social traditions as invaluable supports for a people (black and white alike) whose way of...

The system of Jim Crow laws and the culture of White Supremacy in the American South flourished from the end of the nineteenth century until well into the middle of the twentieth. Based on a hugely unequal distribution of power, it was a social,...

Dorothea Lange was quick to recognize the differences between the destitute farm families whom she photographed in the American West and Southwest and those whom she photographed in the South.1 They all worked the land but in the western parts of the...

In the fictionalized memoir, Run With the Horsemen, Ferrol Sams describes a household morning in the rural piedmont region of Georgia. He writes: In the summertime the long mornings began before day and were filled with breakfast, housecleaning,...

I just finished reading Run With the Horsemen by Ferrol Sams. It's a fictionalized coming-of-age memoir which takes place in the rural piedmont region of Georgia. Sams knew well and artfully describes the cotton farms and dirt-street towns in...