No More Cotton Pickin': A taste of modern-day poetry: This book of poetry is dedicated to Black History Month. In honor of our people and culture. Understanding that black is who we are. But not all that we are. Knowing that our talents, education, and beauty are what define us. This book of poetry is inspired by the Harlem Renaissance period. When modern-day poetry was persuaded by jazz. That focused on human behavior, love, and a passion to dance. Where the most powerful poems centered around the past, present, and future. Realizing that self-expression had become the common theme. Giving you all of that of figurative language, idiomatic expressions, and Ebonics.

The New York Times best selling true story of an unlikely friendship forged between a woman and the man she incorrectly identified as her rapist and sent to prison for 11 years. Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed. Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face-- and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives. With Picking Cotton, Jennifer and Ronald tell in their own words the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the healing power of forgiveness.

In The Second Great Emancipation, Donald Holley uses statistical and narrative analysis to demonstrate that farm mechanization occurred in the Delta region of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi after the region’s population of farm laborers moved away for new opportunities. Rather than pushing labor off the land, Holley argues, the mechanical cotton picker enabled the continuation of cotton cultivation in the post-plantation era, opening the door for the civil rights movement, while ushering a period of prosperity into the South.

Cassidy presents a history of the Irish influence on American slang in a colourful romp through the slums, the gangs of New York and the elaborate scams of grifters and con men, their secret language owing much to the Irish Gaelic imported with many thousands of immigrants. With chapters on How the Irish Invented Poker and How the Irish Invented Jazz, Cassidy stakes a claim for the Irishness of American English. Includes a preface by Peter Quinn and an Irish - American Vernacular Dictionary.

Fast cars, law men, moonshine, romance in the cotton fields, and wild cat whiskey! It was Garden City, Alabama the spring of 1946. Boys were coming home. World War II was over. Many mothers were learning that their sons would not be coming home. Garden City was beginning to settle back in to a nice easy routine. Mr. Sam the local merchant was getting in his sugar orders for the season. The farmers were looking for good crops, and the moonshiners, were looking forward to make good on their orders. A certain revenuer from DC was poking around town. He was trying his best to find out about this "special shine" that everyone was talking about. Cracker Black, the brains behind the operation has a 50 gallon pot making moonshine for a local man named Hollis. Now Hollis is a nefarious character ran several juke joints out on 78 hwy on the strip. When word got round to Cracker his shine was wanted in Memphis and St Louis he had to ramp up the production. He hires two black fellers Big George and Little Willie right out the cotton patch. They are able to work at night in the woods and not be seen by the law because of them being black. When the sleepy little town's folk turn off their lights for the night, the moonshiners go to work making that good old Alabama Shine. Life was good, again.....

Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South. Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these most central social issues. In telling detail Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly underappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America's rise to economic power. When cotton production exploded to satiate the nineteenth-century textile industry's enormous appetite, it became the first truly complex global business and thereby a major driving force in U.S. territorial expansion and sectional economic integration. It propelled New York City to commercial preeminence and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States, providing export capital for the new nation to gain its financial "sea legs" in the world economy. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict at home. Mr. Dattel's skillful historical analysis identifies the commercial forces that cotton unleashed and the pervasive nature of racial antipathy it produced. This is a story that has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of the history of international finance. With 23 black-and-white illustrations.

The first novel from the elusive author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Set in the 1920s in Mexico, B. Traven’s The Cotton-Pickers tells the story of Gerald Gales, who drifts in and out of jobs--on a cotton plantation, an oil field, in a pastry shop, and on a ranch--exposing the dangerous exploitation at each station and fomenting workers’ rights along the way. Adventurous, funny, and full of humanity, TheCotton-Pickers challenges and delights readers to this day. "B. Traven is coming to be recognized as one of the narrative masters of the twentieth century." The New York Times

2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors’ survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep—the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts

A Black Woman's Journey follows Mildred Sirls as a young Black girl in rural east Texas in the 1930s who picked cotton to help her family survive, to her adulthood years as Dr. Mildred Pratt who influenced hundreds of students and empowered a community.