In The Second Great Emancipation, Donald Holley uses statistical and narrative analysis to demonstrate that farm mechanization occurred in the Delta region of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi after the region’s population of farm laborers moved away for new opportunities. Rather than pushing labor off the land, Holley argues, the mechanical cotton picker enabled the continuation of cotton cultivation in the post-plantation era, opening the door for the civil rights movement, while ushering a period of prosperity into the South.

Donald Holley was a professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Monticello for many years. He was the author of Uncle Sam’s Farmers: The New Deal Communities of the Lower Mississippi Valley, and he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arkansas Historical Association.