My Account Wish List
Advanced Search
Print - Close Window
www.greenwood.com/catalog/GM8963.aspx
All Greenwood Products
The Final Frontiers, 1880-1930 Settling the Southern Bottomlands
(Click to Enlarge)
This book is not currently available for purchase Online. Please call 1-800-225-5800 to backorder.
John Solomon Otto
Book Code: GM8963
ISBN: 0-313-28963-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-28963-7
208 pages, tables
Greenwood Press
Publication: 9/30/1999
List Price: $115.00 (UK Sterling Price: £65.00)
Availability: Out of stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Also Available: Ebook
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Series Title: Contributions in American History
Series Number: 183
Reviews:
  • ...provides an excellent overview of development in the bottomlands of the lower Mississippi valley between 1880 and 1930....will serve as a critical source of information for those interested in the southern bottomlands,,,,will particularly interest those who study the government's role in the development of railroads and drainage.
    —Journal of Southern History     May 2001
  • ...a worthwhile addition to the literature on the recent South.
    —Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas
  • ...the book does...provide a readable story and an excellent handbook for students of American economic, environmental and social history.
    —Louisiana History
Description: An examination of the settlement history of the alluvial bottomlands of the lower Mississippi Valley from 1880 to 1930, this study details how cotton-growers transformed the swamplands of northwestern Mississippi, northeastern Louisiana, northeastern Arkansas, and southern Missouri into cotton fields. Although these alluvial bottomlands contained the richest cotton soils in the American South, cotton-growers in the Southern bottomlands faced a host of environmental problems, including dense forests, seasonal floods, water-logged soils, poor transportation, malarial fevers and insect pests. This interdisciplinary approach uses primary and secondary sources from the fields of history, geography, sociology, agronomy, and ecology to fill an important gap in our knowledge of American environmental history. Requiring laborers to clear and cultivate their lands, cotton-growers recruited black and white workers from the upland areas of the Southern states. Growers also supported the levee districts which built imposing embankments to hold the floodwaters in check. Canals and drainage ditches were constructed to drain the lands, and local railways and graveled railways soon ended the area's isolation. Finally, quinine and patent medicines would offer some relief from the malarial fevers that afflicted bottomland residents, and commercial poisons would combat the local pests that attacked the cotton plants, including the boll weevils which arrived in the early twentieth century.
Table of Contents:
  • Preface: Settling the Southern Bottomlands
  • Settling the Southern Bottomlands Before 1880
  • The Southern Bottomlands During the Late Nineteenth Century (1880-1900)
  • The Southern Bottomlands During the Early Twentieth Century (1900-1920)
  • The Southern Bottomlands During the Agricultural Recession (1920-1930)
  • Settling the Southern Bottomlands After 1930
  • Appendix
  • Sources
  • Index
LC Card Number: 99-21710
LCC Class: F215
Dewey Class: 976
All rights reserved. Copyright © 1999-2008 Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
88 Post Road West, Westport CT 06881, (203) 226-3571