Explore the vast range of titles available.

Winner, 2010 Bennett H. Wall Award, Southern Historical Association In this fresh study Brian Schoen views the Deep South and its cotton industry from a global perspective, revisiting old assumptions and providing new insights into the region, the political history of the United States, and the causes of the Civil War. Schoen takes a unique and broad approach. Rather than seeing the Deep South and its planters as isolated from larger intellectual, economic, and political developments, he places the region firmly within them. In doing so, he demonstrates that the region's prominence within the modern world—and not its opposition to it—indelibly shaped Southern history. The place of \"King Cotton\" in the sectional thinking and budding nationalism of the Lower South seems obvious enough, but Schoen reexamines the ever-shifting landscape of international trade from the 1780s through the eve of the Civil War. He argues that the Southern cotton trade was essential to the European economy, seemingly worth any price for Europeans to protect and maintain, and something to defend aggressively in the halls of Congress. This powerful association gave the Deep South the confidence to ultimately secede from the Union. By integrating the history of the region with global events, Schoen reveals how white farmers, planters, and merchants created a \"Cotton South, \" preserved its profitability for many years, and ensured its dominance in the international raw cotton markets. The story he tells reveals the opportunities and costs of cotton production for the Lower South and the United States.

This paper studies how access to financial services among a previously unbanked group affects human capital, labor market, and wealth outcomes. We use novel data from the Freedman’s Savings Bank—created following the American Civil War to serve free Blacks—employing an instrumental variables strategy exploiting the staggered rollout of bank branches. Families with accounts are more likely to have children in school, be literate, work, and have higher occupational income, business ownership, and real estate wealth. Placebo effects are not present using planned but unbuilt branches, or for Whites, suggesting significant positive effects of financial inclusion.

By allowing for an extensive margin in the standard quantity-quality model, we generate new insights into fertility transitions. We test the model on Southern black women affected by a large-scale school construction program. Consistent with our model, women facing improved schooling opportunities for their children were more likely to have at least one child but chose to have smaller families overall. By contrast, women who themselves obtained more schooling due to the program delayed childbearing along both the extensive and intensive margins and entered higher quality occupations, consistent with education raising opportunity costs of child rearing.

The nullification of slave wealth after the US Civil War (1861–1865) was one of the largest episodes of wealth compression in history. We document that White Southern households that owned more slaves in 1860 lost substantially more wealth by 1870, relative to Southern households that had been equally wealthy before the war. Yet, their sons almost entirely recovered from this wealth shock by 1900, and their grandsons completely converged by 1940. Marriage networks and connections to other elite families may have aided in recovery, whereas transmission of entrepreneurship and skills appear less central.

In the American South, postbellum economic development may have been restricted in part by white landowners' access to low-wage black labor. This paper examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on black out-migration and subsequent agricultural development. Flooded counties experienced an immediate and persistent out-migration of black population. Over time, landowners in flooded counties modernized agricultural production and increased its capital intensity relative to landowners in nearby similar nonflooded counties. Landowners resisted black out-migration, however, benefiting from the status quo system of labor-intensive agricultural production.

Investment in both public and private education is aimed at achieving socioeconomic goals, including the reduction of poverty. While a large body of evidence has established a clear negative relationship between education and poverty, policymakers are often in disagreement about the returns to different levels of educational attainment (for example, bachelor’s vs. associate degrees). In this study, the relationship between education and poverty is examined to determine variations over time and space. Census tract-level data were compiled from the 2010–2014 and 2017–2021 5-Year American Community Survey for seven “Deep South” states, widely acknowledged as the poorest region in the USA. Multiscale geographically weighted regression results reveal a shift in the education–poverty relationship from a local scale in the earlier period to a more global relationship in recent years. The results indicate significant shifts in how poverty interacts with educational attainment over time, with associate degrees becoming less influential, while the relationship with bachelor’s degrees expands dramatically. These results highlight the need to consider local and temporal context when considering investments in education. The effects of other economic and demographic factors are also reported.

This paper studies how birth town migration networks affected long-run location decisions during historical US migration episodes. We develop a new method to estimate the strength of migration networks for each receiving and sending location. Our estimates imply that when one randomly chosen African American moved from a Southern birth town to a destination county, then 1.9 additional Black migrants made the same move on average. For White migrants from the Great Plains, the average is only 0.4. Networks were particularly important in connecting Black migrants with attractive employment opportunities and played a larger role in less costly moves.

This paper studies the labor market impact of the Rosenwald Schools Initiative, a school construction program in the early twentieth-century South. Using a new sample linking Social Security and census records, we find that exposure to Rosenwald schools raised Black women’s labor force participation and occupational standing in 1940; however, we find little evidence that Black men’s occupational standing significantly improved. Blacks made no discernible gains in jobs where they were underrepresented, while the gains they achieved were concentrated in jobs where they were commonly found. This suggests that the scope for Black occupational advancement was limited around 1940.

Using geological variation in oil abundance in the Southern US, I examine the long term effects of resource-based specialisation through economic channels. In 1890 oil abundant counties were similar to other nearby counties but after oil was discovered they began to specialise in its production. From 1940-90 oil abundance increased local employment per square kilometre especially in mining but also in manufacturing. Oil abundant counties had higher population growth, higher per capita income and better infrastructure.

The American Civil War is famous for epic battles involving massive armies outfitted in blue and gray uniforms, details that characterize conventional warfare.A Savage Conflictis the first work to treat guerrilla warfare as critical to understanding the course and outcome of the Civil War. Daniel Sutherland argues that irregular warfare took a large toll on the Confederate war effort by weakening support for state and national governments and diminishing the trust citizens had in their officials to protect them.