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How the cotton industry restricted sharecroppers’ access to nutritious food, a public health crisis that spurred a wave of influential and inspiring activism.

Pellagra, a nutritional deficiency disease, was once widespread in the southern United States, where it was concentrated in areas of high-yield cotton production. This wasn’t a coincidence. In the early twentieth century, pellagra was ubiquitous in regions where monocultural cotton production foreclosed cotton workers’ access to nutritious foods. Planters paid sharecroppers and millworkers in their own currency—tokens, coins, and other substitutes for money—and sold them unhealthy and overpriced food in company-owned stores. Employers kept workers poor through wage theft, predatory credit systems, and labor coercion, all of which maintained a system of food scarcity.

In Malady of Monoculture, Dana Landress reveals how the unrelenting demands of the cotton economy during the Jim Crow South created a public health crisis in the form of pellagra. She carefully details a “closed food system” that restricted workers’ diets through employer-generated currency; the use of food as an instrument of labor compulsion; manufactured debt structures; alliances between government and private industry; and restrictions on foraging, gardening, and land use. Though official public health programs framed pellagra in personal and behavioral terms, those afflicted with the illness actively challenged the closed food system through union organizing, community health care, freedom farms, and collective action lawsuits. Excavating the landmark contributions of Black nutritionists to the field of public health, Landress spotlights the many constituencies that worked tirelessly to combat hunger and foregrounds their creativity, resilience, and determination.

First comprehensive account of the mammals of the entire southeastern US

The southeastern United States is home to a remarkable and diverse mammalian fauna that is a significant part of the region’s rich natural heritage. Mammals of the Southeastern United States presents accounts of 137 species that currently or previously occurred in the Southeast. Although accessible and useful for the generalist, this book provides an up-to-date compilation of basic knowledge about native and nonnative mammals of the region that is suitable for students of all ages and for professional mammalogists and biologists alike.

This volume profiles common species like the eastern gray squirrel, the white-tailed deer, and the Virginia opossum, but also includes among its accounts many extant species, such as the jaguar and porcupine, that once occurred in the region; native species, like the Caribbean monk seal, that are now extinct; native species that have been extirpated, or wiped out, from all or part of the region, such as the red wolf, cougar, American bison, and elk; and many introduced species, including the Mexican mouse opossum, common squirrel monkey, and capybara.

Each species account includes full-color images of the animal, plates featuring at least three views of its skull, color distribution maps of its approximate geographic range in the Southeast and in North America, and an up-to-date synthesis of several aspects of its biology, including habitat, diet, predators, parasites, diseases, and behaviors. An introductory chapter on conservation summarizes the current status of mammalian populations in the region and provides insight into some of the threats mammals now encounter in the Southeast.
 

The secret history of manly eating in the Heart of Dixie

Man Food: Recipes from the Iron Trade is a flavorful tribute to Alabama’s industrial soul and culinary heart. Born from the legendary Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham—once the beating heart of the Magic City’s iron industry—this cookbook blends Southern tradition, foundry grit, and backyard hospitality into one unforgettable volume.

Collected from the pages of Pig Iron Rough Notes, a magazine once circulated among Alabama’s ironworkers, these recipes reflect the lives of men who forged metal by day and cooked with cast iron by night. Inside, you’ll find dishes like Brunswick Stew, Catfish Chowder, and Bean Hole Beans—hearty meals rooted in Alabama’s outdoors, work camps, and family kitchens.

With colorful stories, vintage illustrations, and a deep appreciation for cast-iron cooking, Man Food celebrates the “Gentlemen Cooks” of the South—men who knew that good food and good company were just as important as hard work. Whether you're a native Alabamian, a history buff, or a lover of Southern foodways, this book offers a delicious slice of Alabama culture.

Fire up your skillet, pour a cup of camp coffee, and taste the legacy of the Iron Trade—Alabama style.

An interdisciplinary excavation of colonoware as a material archive of African, Indigenous, and colonial entanglements across the early American South.

In Materializing Colonial Identities in Clay, Jon Bernard Marcoux, Corey A. H. Sattes, and contributors examine colonoware to explore the active roles that African Americans and Indigenous people played in constructing southern colonial culture and part of their shared history with Europeans.

Colonoware was most likely produced by African and Indigenous potters and used by all colonial groups for cooking, serving, and storing food. It formed the foundation of colonial foodways in many settlements across the southeastern United States. Even so, compared with other ceramics from this period, less has been understood about its production and use because of the lack of documentation. This collection of essays fills this gap with valuable, recent archaeological data from which much may be surmised about the interaction among Europeans, Indigenous, and Africans, especially within the contexts of the African and Indigenous slave trade and plantation systems.

The chapters represent the full range of colonoware research: from the beginning to the end of its production, from urban to rural contexts, and from its intraregional variation in the Lowcountry to the broad patterns of colonialism across the early American Southeast. The book summarizes current approaches in colonoware research and how these may bridge the gaps between broader colonial American studies, Indigenous studies, and African Diaspora studies.

A concluding discussion contextualizes the chapters through the perspectives of intersectionality and Black feminist theory, drawing attention to the gendered and racialized meanings embodied in colonoware, and considering how colonialism and slavery have shaped these cultural dimensions and archaeologists’ study of them.
 

A critical study of the expansion of federal law enforcement across the post-Civil War American South and frontier West.

In the decades immediately following the Civil War, the United States expanded rapidly. As the nation grew, so too did federal law, moving into areas of citizens’ lives previously regulated by local custom and state and territorial statutes.

Drawing on contemporary accounts and the letters that flowed between the Washington office of the Justice Department and its attorneys and marshals throughout the states and territories, Cresswell uses a case-study approach to explore the enforcement of federal law in four regions. In northern Mississippi, the rights of freedmen to vote clashed with established rules of relations between blacks and whites. In Utah Territory, Mormon polygamy and economic dominance challenged the aspirations of non-Mormon settlers. In eastern Tennessee, desperate poverty lent enchantment to the easy money of moonshining. In Arizona Territory, frontier greed and violence threatened the lives of people and the chances of early admission to the Union of states.

Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansmen moves beyond these local case studies to illuminate larger questions, including the evolution of the American criminal justice system, the relationship of the South and the West to the rest of the nation, the workings of the 19th-century American bureaucracy, and conflict of the local, state, and federal governments.

Out of the efforts of these early federal marshals came the modern federal justice system, with its firm policy guidelines, its Federal Bureau of Investigation, and its broader powers over the country as a whole.

The definitive guide to the Southeast’s most persistent—and medically important—tiny predators.

Mosquitoes of the Southeastern United States is a full-color, highly illustrated guide to the sixty-four known species of mosquitoes in eleven genera that populate the South—from the Gulf Coastal states to the Carolinas. In addition to detailed and fully illustrated identification keys for both larvae and adults, it includes information on the mosquito’s lifecycle, interaction with humans, and biological diversity in the southeast.

This area of the country has a rich mosquito fauna with diverse species ranging from the tiny pitcher plant mosquito to the brilliantly colored cannibal mosquito. Close-up photographs of live adults showcase their widely varied and beautiful bodies while remarkable images made with the aid of a microaquarium reveal the differences in larval stages of the subjects. For each species described, Nathan D. Burkett-Cadena provides biological information including distribution maps, habitat associations of the larvae and adults, range of animals fed upon, and importance from a medical standpoint.

This book’s usefulness to mosquito control programs in the Southeast and beyond cannot be overstated. Not only for native species, but for new species introduced from exotic locales, mosquitoes must be properly identified in order to know how best to control them. This volume will also be valuable to medical and public health specialists working on mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, West Nile virus, and filariasis. Mosquitoes of the Southeastern United States is the first guide to integrate full-color photography, illustrated keys, and current information on the biology of mosquitoes into one definitive resource.

The adoption of the mule as the major agricultural resource in the American South and its later displacement by the mechanical tractor.

The author describes the adoption of the mule as the major agricultural resource in the American South and its later displacement by the mechanical tractor. After describing the surprising slowness of southern farmers to realize the superiority of the mule over the horse for agricultural labor, Ellenberg strives to capture the symbiosis that emerged between animal and man to illuminate why and how the mule became a standard feature in Southern folk culture.

Having been slow to adopt the mule, southern farmers were then reluctant to set it aside in favor of the tractor. Ellenberg describes the transformation as the tractor gradually displaced the mule and the role of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in this process.

The work not only becomes a survey of the development of southern agriculture as revealed through an examination of this premier work animal but also follows the emergence of the animal as a cultural icon, as it figures in southern literature, folklore, and music.