Here is the story of the long interaction between humans, land, and climate in the American South. It is a tale of exploitation and erosion, of destruction, disease, and defeat, but also of the persistent search for knowledge and wisdom. It is a story whose villains were also its victims and sometimes its heroes. Ancient forces created the southern landscape, but, as Albert E. Cowdrey shows, humankind from the time of earliest habitation has been at work reshaping it. The southern Indians, far from being the "natural ecologists" of myth, radically transformed their environment by hunting and burning. Such patterns were greatly accelerated by the arrival of Europeans, who viewed the land as a commodity to be exploited for immediate economic benefit. Cowdrey documents not only the long decline but the painfully slow struggle to repair the damage of human folly. The eighteenth century saw widespread though ineffectual efforts to protect game and conserve the soil. In the nineteenth century the first hesitant steps were taken toward scientific flood control, forestry, wildlife protection, and improved medicine. In this century, the New Deal, the explosion in scientific knowledge, and the national environmental movement have spurred more rapid improvements. But the efforts to harness the South's great rivers, to save its wild species, and to avert serious environmental pollution have often had equivocal results. Originally published in 1983 and needed now more than ever, This Land, This South was the first book to explore the cumulative impact of humans on the southern landscape and its effect on them. In graceful and at times lyrical prose, Albert Cowdrey brings together a vast array of information. Now revised and updated, this important book should be read by every person concerned with the past, present, or future of the South.

No general history of southern farming since the end of slavery has been published until now. For the first time, Gilbert C. Fite has drawn together the many threads that make up commercial agricultural development in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, to explain why agricultural change was so slow in the South, and then to show how the agents of change worked after 1933 to destroy the old and produce a new agriculture. Fite traces the decline and departure of King Cotton as the hard taskmaster of the region, and the replacement of cotton by a somewhat more democratically rewarding group of farm products: poultry, cattle, swine; soybeans; citrus and other fruits; vegetables; rice; dairy products; and forest products. He shows how such crop changes were related to other developments, such as the rise of a capital base in the South, mainly after World War II; technological innovation in farming equipment; and urbanization and regional population shifts. Based largely upon primary sources, Cotton Fields No More will become the standard work on post-Civil War agriculture in the South. It will be welcomed by students of the American South and of United States agriculture, economic, and social history.

The essentially tragic political fate of the American South in the nineteenth century resulted from what Robert F. Durden calls a ""self-inflicted wound""-the gradual surrender of the white majority to the pride, fears, and hates of racism. In this gracefully written and closely reasoned study, Durden traces the course of southern political life from the predominantly optimistic, nationalistic Jeffersonian era to the sullenly sectional, chronically defensive decades following the Civil War. Politics, as the clearest reflection of the southern electorate's collective hopes and fears, illustrates the South's transition from buoyant nationalism to aggrieved sectionalism. Like the rest of the new nation, the South entered the nineteenth century as proud heirs of the American Revolution and its ideology of liberty, property, and equal rights. But for southerners, from the 1820s on, that liberty came increasingly to mean the freedom to own slave property and to take that property into the nation's new western territories. As the possibility of a ban on slavery in the territories rose to the center of national attention during and after the Mexican War, the South's views on the ""peculiar institution"" became increasingly defensive and intransigent. The presidential victory in 1860 of an all-northern party pledged to the exclusion of slavery from the territories made the Civil War inevitable. In its aftermath, white southerners sought and ultimately found, in the hegemony of the Democratic party, other ways to maintain their national position and their dominance over the black minority. But the South would long suffer the aftereffects of its ""self-inflicted wound.""