Breaking the Land

Pete Daniel is a public historian and past president of the Organization of American Historians. He is the author of Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights and The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969.

Winner of the Herbert Feis Award of the American Historical Association, 1985. Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award of the Southern Historical Association, 1985. Winner of the 1990 Robert Athearn Award of the Western History Association and an Honorable Mention for the 1990 James S. Donnelly, Sr., Prize in History and the Social Sciences from the American Conference for Irish Studies."Daniel exposes the human cost of the epic capitalist transformation of cotton culture, as well as the injustices and inadequacies of the federal programs that have governed the lives of southern farmers in all three crops since the New Deal. . . . His book is a major contribution to Southern history."--Journal of American History "A fresh, original, and gracefully written work, enriched by abundant photographs (only a few of them familiar) and carefully wrought maps."--Choice "Daniel's respect for the common man and his clear-eyed estimate of what they have gained and lost makes this book even more than a comprehensive history of Southern agriculture in the twentieth century--it makes it a moving drama whose end has not yet arrived."--Virginia Quarterly Review