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The accomplished poet and scholar John Crowe Ransom made profound contributions to twentieth-century American literature. As a teacher at Vanderbilt University he was also a leading member of the Southern Agrarian movement and a contributor to the movement's manifestoI'll Take My Stand. Ransom's Land! is a previously unpublished work that unites Ransom's poetic sensibilities with an examination of economics at the height of the Great Depression. Politically charged with Ransom's aesthetic beliefs about literature and his agrarian interpretation of economics,Land! was long thought to have been burned by its author after he failed to find a publisher. Thankfully, the manuscript was discovered, and we are now able to read this unique and interesting contribution to the Southern Agrarian revival. After the publication of I'll Take My Stand in 1930, Ransom, who provided the book's Statement of Principles in addition to its lead essay, became convinced that the book had not adequately proposed an economic alternative to Northern industrialism, which had fairly obliterated the Southern way of life.Land! was Ransom's attempt to fill this gap. In it he presents the weaknesses inherent in capitalism and argues convincingly that socialism is not only an inadequate alternative but inimical to American sensibilities. He proposes instead that agrarianism, which could flourish alongside capitalism, would relieve the problems of unemployment and the \"permanently unemployed.\" In particular, he argues that what he calls the \"amphibian farmer\"-who can survive in both a monetary and a non-monetary economy- would never, so long as he relied on himself for necessities, have to fear unemployment. America, Ransom claims, is unique in offering this opportunity because, unlike in European countries, land is plentiful.

Ransom's Land! is a previously unpublished work that unites Ransom's poetic sensibilities with an examination of economics at the height of the Great Depression.

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort.Freedom Farmersexpands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

The Manumit School, a socialist boarding house, housed refugees for a brief time but was only a transitory place for the family as they searched for permanent settlement. Johnson was a Danish American economist and humanitarian who had previously co-founded the progressive New School for Social Research, a private research university, in 1919. When the Nazis rose to power, Johnson recruited persecuted European scholars to study in New York as part of the New School's \"University in Exile,\" saving their lives in the process. Johnson imagined that it would give Jews an opportunity to practice the romanticized \"art of living off the soil,\" preventing a \"ghetto psychology\" from developing among immigrants in overcrowded cities.

From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations around the world, including the United States, have turned to guestworker programs to manage migration. These temporary labor recruitment systems represented a state-brokered compromise between employers who wanted foreign workers and those who feared rising numbers of immigrants. Unlike immigrants, guestworkers couldn't settle, bring their families, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead of creating a manageable form of migration, guestworker programs created an especially vulnerable class of labor. Based on a vast array of sources from U.S., Jamaican, and English archives, as well as interviews,No Man's Landtells the history of the American \"H2\" program, the world's second oldest guestworker program. Since World War II, the H2 program has brought hundreds of thousands of mostly Jamaican men to the United States to do some of the nation's dirtiest and most dangerous farmwork for some of its biggest and most powerful agricultural corporations, companies that had the power to import and deport workers from abroad. Jamaican guestworkers occupied a no man's land between nations, protected neither by their home government nor by the United States. The workers complained, went on strike, and sued their employers in class action lawsuits, but their protests had little impact because they could be repatriated and replaced in a matter of hours. No Man's Landputs Jamaican guestworkers' experiences in the context of the global history of this fast-growing and perilous form of labor migration.

George Washington Carver (ca. 1864-1943) is at once one of the most familiar and misunderstood figures in American history. In My Work Is That of Conservation, Mark D. Hersey reveals the life and work of this fascinating man who is widely-and reductively-known as the African American scientist who developed a wide variety of uses for the peanut. Carver had a truly prolific career dedicated to studying the ways in which people ought to interact with the natural world, yet much of his work has been largely forgotten. Hersey rectifies this by tracing the evolution of Carver's agricultural and environmental thought starting with his childhood in Missouri and Kansas and his education at the Iowa Agricultural College. Carver's environmental vision came into focus when he moved to the Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, where his sensibilities and training collided with the denuded agrosystems, deep poverty, and institutional racism of the Black Belt. It was there that Carver realized his most profound agricultural thinking, as his efforts to improve the lot of the area's poorest farmers forced him to adjust his conception of scientific agriculture. Hersey shows that in the hands of pioneers like Carver, Progressive Era agronomy was actually considerably \"greener\" than is often thought today. My Work Is That of Conservation uses Carver's life story to explore aspects of southern environmental history and to place this important scientist within the early conservation movement.

The Great Depression emboldened Americans to tolerate radical experimentation in search of solutions to seemingly overwhelming economic problems. Amongst the thorniest of those was rural southern poverty. InTrouble in Goshen, Fred C. Smith focuses on three communities designed and implemented to meet that challenge. This book examines the economic and social theories--and their histories--that resulted in the creation and operation of the most aggressive and radical experiments in the United States. Trouble in Goshenchronicles three communitarian experiments, both the administrative details and the struggles and reactions of the clients. Smith covers the Tupelo Homesteads in Mississippi, the Dyess Colony in Arkansas, and the Delta Cooperative Farm, also in Mississippi. The Tupelo Homesteads were created under the aegis of the tiny Division of Subsistence Homesteads, a short-lived, \"first New Deal\" agency. Dyess Colony was the largest of the Resettlement Administration's efforts to transform failed farmers into Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. The third community, the Delta Cooperative Farm, a product of the active cooperation between the Socialist Party of America and a cadre of liberal churchmen led by Reinhold Niebuhr, attempted to meld the pieties, passions, propaganda, and theories of Jesus and Marx. The equipment, facilities, and management styles of the projects reveal a clearly delineated class order among the poor.Trouble in Goshendemonstrates the class conscious angst that enveloped three distinct levels of poverty and the struggles of plain folk to preserve their tenuous status and avoid overt peasantry.

This paper argues that participation in natural resource management, which is often coupled with moves for more local ownership of decisionmaking, is based on three sets of assumptions: about the role of the state, the universality of application of such approaches and the transformatory potential of institutional reform. The validity of these assumptions requires investigation in view of the rapid institutionalisation and scaling-up of participatory approaches, particularly in developing country contexts. Post-apartheid South Africa is widely recognised as a pioneer of participatory and devolutionary approaches, particularly in the field of water resources. It is 12 years since the promulgation of the forward-thinking 1998 National Water Act, and thus an opportune moment to reflect on South Africa's experiences of participatory governance. Drawing on empirical research covering the establishment of the first Catchment Management Agency, and the transformation of existing Irrigation Boards into more inclusive Water User Associations in the Inkomati Water Management Area, it emerges that there may be fundamental weaknesses in the participatory model and underlying assumptions, and indeed such approaches may actually reinforce inequitable outcomes: the legacy of long-established institutional frameworks and powerful actors therein continues to exert influence in post-apartheid South Africa, and has the potential to subvert the democratic and redistributive potential of the water reforms. It is argued that a reassessment of the role of the state is necessary: where there is extreme heterogeneity in challenging catchments more, rather than less, state intervention may be required to uphold the interests of marginalised groups and effect redistribution.