Product Description
In volcanically active, post Civil War Alabama, a young man leaves his demented father's compound and seeks a job and a mate among fellow Alabamns who consider him genetically suspect. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Yes, the book is every bit as strange as its title.
For your consideration, imagine a late nineteenth-century part-time farmer, mail carrier, and sometimes school teacher dwelling upon a plot of ground that runs down, quite literally, to the edge of the earth itself.Imagine him, further, as the most naive and most earnest man who ever lived and then, continuing in this vein, imagine a Paleolithic Alabama infested by active volcanoes where bands of wandering flagellants trespass by night, a time when the planets haven't yet settled into final form and forlorn men come to town fetching pigs to market at the end of a leash.
Now, stay one moment more as I explain that all this is seen through a fog of thought and memory and the best-cadenced prose we've seen in this country for a very long time.Fields of AsphodelLee

Most unusual, Strangely poetic & Funny
I loved this book.It just flows through geologic periods, through space and time with no limits.It's very dreamlike, with little realism.A young man, Ben, lives in Alabama with his father and ten brothers at the edge of the world among volcanoes and planets, measuring the world by the size of the family's property.Ben finally grows up, leaves the farm and ventures into the city to seek an education and get a job.He winds up running a dry goods store and has difficulty making money because he doesn't want to part with the merchandise he considers most beautiful.He marries a girl whose house has burned down, but who still has the land.Then he takes a test and winds up with a job as a mail carrier, able to support a family.This is a most unusual, imaginative and quite funny book. Fields of Asphodel

A Beautiful Book!
Like the fiction of William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, the poetic prose is what makes Perdue's book a great work of southern literature.The language is so beautiful as to render the plot of secondary importance.In his previous novels, Mr. Perdue's main character was Lee.His grandfather, Ben is the hero of Opportunities.Trying to earn his way in the post Civil War era, Ben leaves the family farm and turns his ability to spell to account by gaining a teaching position and a wife with acres of farmland, and later, a government job.Perdue's talent is that he paints the nobility and humor in this uniquely southern character with sensitive and lush verbal coloration.A beautiful book - but very unlike his early novels ... Read more

Product Description
This first history of cattle raising in a southern state documents the development of the industry in Alabama from colonial times to the present within the broader contexts of southern and American agricultural history. Cattle raising today is the most widely practiced form of agriculture in Alabama and ranks second only to the poultry industry in terms of revenue. Brooks Blevins not only relates the development and relative importance of the industry to agricultural practices but also presents it as an integral component of southern history, inextricably linked to issues of sectional politics, progressivism, race and class struggles, and rural depopulation. Blevins's study increases our understanding of the history of southern agriculture by providing a valuable model of a story repeated throughout the South. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Wonderful
Cattle in the Cotton Fields is a wonderful account of thecattle history in Alabama.I was very impressed by the writing ofMr. Blevins.I highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested in the subject matter. ... Read more

Product Description
By the 1930s, decades of inefficient cotton farming had stripped the topsoil from thousands of acres of Macon County, Alabama. The land's inhabitants, mostly poor black farmers and sharecroppers, were starving in their weather-beaten shacks; the land was simply too worn out for them to make a living. This book describes these conditions and then traces the history of an innovative New Deal program established by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to reclaim the land and the people's lives. The Tuskegee Land Utilization Study converted much of the land into what is now the Tuskegee National Forest. It also established the model settlement of Prairie Farms. In this volume, Pasquill assesses the project seven decades later. The book also includes interviews with descendants of some of the original Prairie Farms participants. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A welcome contribution to both American history and agricultural history shelves
Planting Hope on Worn-Out Land: History of the Tuskegee Land Utilization Project, Macon County, Alabama 1935-1959 is a thoughtful historical chronicle of a project that helped rehabilitate the barely farmable land that African-Americans were sharecropping upon at the close of the Civil War. This land would eventually become the Tuskegee National Forest. The second part of Planting Hope on Worn-Out Land tells the stories of the four hundred black families who were relocated to the community of Prairie Farms by the Resettlement Administration. Ultimately a story of success - both in bringing life back to the land and to providing work and the opportunity to tend to one's own farm to some African-American families amid devastating economic conditions - Planting Hope on Worn-Out Land is a welcome contribution to both American history and agricultural history shelves. ... Read more

Product Description
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A common perception is that the birth of Cooperative Extension followed passage of the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which provided federal funds to land-grant universities to support Extension work. In a formal sense, this is true. Even so, the roots of Cooperative Extension extend as far back as the late 18th century, following the American Revolution, when affluent farmers first began organizing groups to sponsor educational meetings to disseminate useful farming information. In some cases, these lectures even were delivered by university professors ? a practice that foreshadowed Cooperative Extension work more than a century later. These efforts became more formalized over time. By the 1850s, for example, many schools and colleges had begun holding farmer institutes ? public meetings where lecturers discussed new farming insights. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format.Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship. ... Read more