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Book Review
Canada and the United States
John C. Willis. Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War. (The American South Series.) Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 2000. Pp. xiv, 239. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.
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On a summer drive through the Mississippi Delta, one can see crop rows planted to within inches of buildings and even whole towns, resembling kudzu converging on an abandoned car or a sleeping dog. On the surface, the Delta seems to have remained a changeless region during its short history since American settlement. Yet the northwest portion of Mississippi, lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, has inspired countless memoirs and scholarly studies. John C. Willis's gracefully written monograph complements the rest by examining the commercial development of the Delta from a veritable frontier in the 1860s to a plantation empire at the turn of the century. |
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The Delta's postbellum denizenssoutherners (black and white), northerners, and foreignersdismissed Henry Grady's vision of a commercially diverse New South and reverted to the old monoculture of cotton. The rich soil, some of the best in the world and delivered anew every spring by flooding rivers, was supposed to make Delta pioneers rich. They were rich in tasks if nothing else. |
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