John Otto – författare

Although many specialized studies have dealt with the colonial and antebellum American South, very little attention has been paid to the Southern agricultural frontiers before 1860. This study focuses on agriculture, the primary economic activity and the single most important factor in shaping the South's colonial and antebellum frontiers. After examining the agricultural economy on the Southern seaboard during colonial times, Otto explains the economic and environmental forces that led to the expansion of upland and lowland agriculturalists across the trans-Appalachian South during the antebellum period.Although many specialized studies have dealt with the colonial and antebellum American South, very little attention has been paid to the Southern agricultural frontiers before 1860. This study focuses on agriculture, the primary economic activity and the single most important factor in shaping the South's colonial and antebellum frontiers. After examining the agricultural economy on the Southern seaboard during colonial times, Otto explains the economic and environmental forces that led to the expansion of upland and lowland agriculturalists across the trans-Appalachian South during the antebellum period. Synthesizing sources drawn from history, geography, anthropology, and folklife, Otto has added an important new dimension to our knowledge of the American South. This book is an appropriate resource for courses or studies in Southern and American history, historical geography, folklife, anthropology, and agricultural history.

This is the first book to assess the contribution of Southern agriculture to the Confederate war effort, to describe the damage that agriculture sustained during the war, to analyze the transition from slavery to free labor after the war, and to recount the slow and painful process of rebuilding Southern agriculture by 1880. Synthesizing primary and secondary historical sources, Southern Agriculture During the Civil War Era, 1860-1880 fills a crucial gap in our knowledge about the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction period.

An examination of the settlement history of the alluvial bottomlands of the lower Mississippi Valley from 1880 to 1930, this study details how cotton-growers transformed the swamplands of northwestern Mississippi, northeastern Louisiana, northeastern Arkansas, and southern Missouri into cotton fields. Although these alluvial bottomlands contained the richest cotton soils in the American South, cotton-growers in the Southern bottomlands faced a host of environmental problems, including dense forests, seasonal floods, water-logged soils, poor transportation, malarial fevers and insect pests. This interdisciplinary approach uses primary and secondary sources from the fields of history, geography, sociology, agronomy, and ecology to fill an important gap in our knowledge of American environmental history.Requiring laborers to clear and cultivate their lands, cotton-growers recruited black and white workers from the upland areas of the Southern states. Growers also supported the levee districts which built imposing embankments to hold the floodwaters in check. Canals and drainage ditches were constructed to drain the lands, and local railways and graveled railways soon ended the area's isolation. Finally, quinine and patent medicines would offer some relief from the malarial fevers that afflicted bottomland residents, and commercial poisons would combat the local pests that attacked the cotton plants, including the boll weevils which arrived in the early twentieth century.