Dr.Clark looks at the paths of education, agriculture, and conservsation from 1865-1940 in the South.

Dr.Clark looks at the paths of education, agriculture, and conservsation from 1865-1940 in the South.

Up from the Mudsills of Hell analyzes agrarian activism in Tennessee from the 1870s to 1915 within the context of farmers’ lives, community institutions, and familial and communal networks. Locating the origins of the agrarian movements in the state’s late antebellum and post-Civil War farm economy, Connie Lester traces the development of rural reform from the cooperative efforts of the Grange, the Agricultural Wheel, and the Farmers’ Alliance through the insurgency of the People’s Party and the emerging rural bureaucracy of the Cooperative Extension Service and the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. Lester ties together a rich and often contradictory history of cooperativism, prohibition, disfranchisement, labor conflicts, and third-party politics to show that Tennessee agrarianism was more complex and threatening to the established political and economic order than previously recognized. As farmers reached across gender, racial, and political boundaries to create a mass movement, they shifted the ground under the monoliths of southern life. Once the Democratic Party had destroyed the insurgency, farmers responded in both traditional and progressive ways. Some turned inward, focusing on a localism that promoted--sometimes through violence--rigid adherence to established social boundaries. Others, however, organized into the Farmers’ Union, whose membership infiltrated the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and the Cooperative Extension Service. Acting through these bureaucracies, Tennessee agrarian leaders exerted an important influence over the development of agricultural legislation for the twentieth century. Up from the Mudsills of Hell not only provides an important reassessment of agrarian reform and radicalism in Tennessee, but also links this Upper South state into the broader sweep of southern and American farm movements emerging in the late nineteenth century.

Includes section "Book reviews."

Editors Wilson (history, Mississippi) and Ferris (anthropology, Detroit and Bakersfield. Literate, scholarly and pithy entries accompanied by well chosen photographs artfully placed. Far too good a book to be printed on acidic paper; our test contradicts the statement on the verso of the title page. The price is $49.95 until January 1990. Mississippi) have devoted 10 years to the realization of a unique concept. Involving many scholars and writers in many fields, this book ranges from grand historical themes to the whimsical; from the arts and high culture to folk and popular culture, organized around 245 thematic sections such as, history, religion, language, art and architecture, etc. Focuses on the eleven states of the former confederacy, but also encompases southern outposts in midwestern and middle-Atlantic border states, even the southern pockets of Chicago, Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR