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Despite the vast changes in plantation agriculture following the Civil War and Reconstruction, the lot of small farmers was little improved.Examining the nonplantation region of upcountry Georgia as a microcosm of the South, Steven Hahn showed how farmers were buffeted by such forces as the unravelling of antebellum household economy,.

The hijacking could further harm Turkey's tense relations with Russia, its giant neighbor to the north. Russian officials, who suspect that Turks harbor a secret sympathy with their Muslim cousins in Chechnya, said today that they had warned Turkey that Chechen rebels were building a support network on Turkish soil, and that Turkish officials had ignored their warnings. On Wednesday, the official Turkish news agency reported that the chief of Turkey's intelligence service had struck a deal with the hijackers, agreeing to allow them to dock at Istanbul and give a news conference if they would free their hostages. Today, however, the news agency said it had confused the identity of the Turk who was speaking with the hijackers by radio. He turned out to be not the intelligence chief, Sonmez Baykan, but Sonmez Koksal, head of a Turkish organization that supports Caucasian causes.

In Grozny, the capital of the disputed province, Russian security officials reported that another group of rebels kidnapped all 30 employees of a power substation on the outskirts of town and drove them to an unknown location. Chechen rebels denied the assertion, although a top aide to the Chechen leader, Dzhokhar M. Dudayev, declared a campaign of \"widespread terrorist activity\" to promote the demand for the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Chechnya. \"There is nothing good to say,\" commented Oleg I. Lobov, head of Mr. Yeltsin's National Security Council and his representative in Chechnya, on Russian television Tuesday evening. \"We have intercepted the Chechen radio communications. They promise that everything will be better in the next world.\" A voice believed to be that of Mr. Raduyev, sounding tense but steady, was heard on the Voice of Chechnya television on Tuesday, telling a Chechen commander that \"Pervomayskoye is under our complete control.\" While there is no proof that the voice was that of the rebel leader, many people who have spoken with him often in the past confirmed that the voice sounded authentic.

Russian soldiers searching for mines and bombs swept the central square of the Chechen capital, Grozny, today after demonstrators for independence ended a tense weeklong standoff. \"The residents of Shatoi district promised not to allow rebels on their territory, not to conduct military operations against Russian troops, and not to prevent the new Chechen government from implementing its plans to rebuild the republic,\" a reporter from ORT television said.

As some of Russia's erstwhile allies in Central Europe have already shown, the passage from tyranny to democracy is going to be long and uneven, and democratic elections will not always produce democratic leaders. Communists of one stripe or another have returned to power through elections in Bulgaria, Hungary and, most recently, in Poland. Russia could be next. Under Russia's new Constitution, Parliament is overshadowed by the presidency. Unless one party or a coalition of parties can control two-thirds of the seats, the number required to override presidential vetoes, the legislature cannot itself change the direction of Moscow's domestic and foreign policies. But in tandem with presidential elections scheduled for next June, the vote this Sunday will help determine whether Russia is ready to accelerate or slow reform.

What is needed now is healing and a constructive dialogue with the rest of Canada over Quebec's legitimate political grievances. Canada's latest Constitution, dating only to 1982, eroded Quebec's traditional status as Canada's largest province and the citadel of one of its two founding cultures. Revising the Constitution to restore to Quebec the weight it deserves in Canadian affairs would honor both the majority who put their faith in Canada and the minority who voted for a sovereign Quebec closely linked to Ottawa. Quebec's separatist movement helped inspire and lead a \"quiet revolution\" of intellectual, cultural and economic renewal in a once-sleepy province. Quebec now has its own dynamic business class. Its people enjoy an enviable living standard and its politicians hold many of Canada's top national posts. Separatists want firm guarantees for Quebec's distinctive identity as well. Achieving these guarantees within the Canadian Constitution is the right response to Monday's divided vote.

Speculation is rife about Mr. Yeltsin's possible role, given the fact that the commission's chairman is his appointee. Was this a Yeltsin-inspired maneuver to eliminate Yabloko, his main rival on the reform side? Or was it a case of hard-liners in Mr. Yeltsin's entourage taking advantage of his temporary physical incapacity? Even if the supreme court reverses the ruling, as now seems likely, suspicions of this sort could set back Russia's democratic development.

In Nicaragua, Interior Minister Tomas Borge urged Nicaraguans in a televised speech last night to be prepared for ''further Honduran aggression'' and said raiders loyal to the late President...

AND A CONGRESS OF WHICH PARTY? - It is not only the Presidency whose character a Republican surge toward Mr. Reagan could change. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 34 of the 100 seats in the Senate will be filled today. Senator Howard H.

\"We'll march to Trenton, we'll leave Trenton, we'll go back to our various neighborhoods and get to work,\" Mr. Jackson said. Last Monday, a few hundred march veterans and their supporters gathered at a Rutgers University auditorium in Camden to listen to speakers like the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, president of the National Million Man March Coalition, to chant \"Long live the spirit of the Million Man March!\" and to participate in a \"Stop the Violence\" rally.\" \"It's a tremendous undertaking,\" Mr. Jackson said. \"If we can pull this off, we'll have the motivation to do a lot more.\"