The first book-length study of Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Farm, the two communities that drew on internationalist practices of cooperative communalism and pragmatically challenged Jim Crow segregation and plantation labor in the 1930s and beyond.

Delta Cooperative Farm 1936-1942 and Providence Farm 1938-1956 were intentional communities in rural Mississippi that drew on Christian socialism, cooperative communalism, and social egalitarianism to enact progressive and leftist challenges to the South's racial hierarchy and labor practices. This dissertation demonstrates that even in the closed society that Mississippi represented, the rural poor and their leftist allies could challenge hegemonic social structures by employing a cooperative economy, operating a desegregated health clinic, holding interracial church and union meetings, and successfully managing a cooperative credit union. For twenty years, the farms were a beacon of hope and safe haven for southerners engaged in racial amelioration, labor reform, and black self-help. By the mid 1950s, however, the armies of massive resistance forced the closing of the remaining farm while internal racial tension bubbled to the surface among farm residents. The story of Delta and Providence is a measure of the possibilities for and obstacles to transformative change in the rural South during the mid-twentieth century. Race and the Rural South also places Delta and Providence within the context of the major social and economic changes taking place in the rural South from the Great Depression, through World War II, and into the early years of the classic phase of the civil rights movement. Dynamic labor activism in the 1930s rural South abated during the war years when agriculture further mechanized and many dirt farmers moved off the land and into factories. Civil rights activism, intimately entwined with labor unionism in the 1930s, was grounded in interracialism--black and white activists tackling their problems together--but World War II also changed this dynamic as whites left the farms. After World War II, African Americans living at Providence deliberately engaged in black self-help endeavors, using the farm as a sort of free space to carry out their visions for a democratic society. In these ways, Delta and Providence farms were representative of a rapidly changing region.

Many people characterize urban renewal projects and the power of eminent domain as two of the most widely despised and often racist tools for reshaping American cities in the postwar period. In A World More Concrete, N. D. B. Connolly uses the history of South Florida to unearth an older and far more complex story. Connolly captures nearly eighty years of political and land transactions to reveal how real estate and redevelopment created and preserved metropolitan growth and racial peace under white supremacy. Using a materialist approach, he offers a long view of capitalism and the color line, following much of the money that made land taking and Jim Crow segregation profitable and preferred approaches to governing cities throughout the twentieth century. A World More Concrete argues that black and white landlords, entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders used tenements and repeated land dispossession to take advantage of the poor and generate remarkable wealth. Through a political culture built on real estate, South Florida’s landlords and homeowners advanced property rights and white property rights, especially, at the expense of more inclusive visions of equality. For black people and many of their white allies, uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines. Yet, for many reformers, confiscating certain kinds of real estate through eminent domain also promised to help improve housing conditions, to undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians. Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim Crow America. It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners’ power to reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.

Parallel agrarian societies : the U.S. South and Mexico, 1870s-1920s -- Sharecroppers and campesinos : Mexican revolutionary agrarianism in the rural New Deal -- Haciendas and plantations : the agrarian New Deal in Cardenista Mexico -- Rockefeller rural development : from the U.S. cotton belt to Mexico -- Green revolutions : U.S. regionalism and the Mexican agricultural program -- Transplanting "El Tenesi" : New Deal hydraulic development in postwar Mexico

Emphasizing the role of kinship, labor, and networks in the African American community, the author retraces six generations of black struggles since the end of the Civil War, revealing a "nation" under construction.

This book captures the views of students of rural America on the serious state of affaire in rural South areas and on the strategies for stimulating improvements in the well-being of rural Southerners. It spurs policymakers, leaders, and rural residents to redress the ills of the rural South.

The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and economic dispossession caused by the collapse of socialism continue to force Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reconfigure their religious lives and societal values. David Henig draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past--and how doing so shapes the present. In particular, Henig questions how contemporary religious imagination, experience, and practice infuse and interact with social forms like family and neighborhood and with the legacies of past ruptures and critical events. His observations and analysis go to the heart of how societal and historical entanglements shape, fracture, and reconfigure religious convictions and conduct. Provocative and laden with eyewitness detail, Remaking Muslim Lives offers a rare sustained look at what it means to be Muslim and live a Muslim life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.