Pete Daniel

Compiles photographs from "five different sources in the New Deal: the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the National Youth Administration (NYA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), as well as the Farm Security Administration (FSA)."--Page x.

The spring and summer of 1927, the Mississippi River and its tributaries flooded from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Gulf of Mexico, tearing through seven states, sometimes spreading out to nearly one hundred miles across. Pete Daniel's Deep'n as It Come, available again in a new format, chronicles the worst flood in the history of the South and re-creates, with extraordinary immediacy, the Mississippi River's devastating assault on property and lives. Daniel weaves his narrative with newspaper and firsthand accounts, interviews with survivors, official reports, and over 140 contemporary photographs. The story of the common refugee who suffered most from the effects of the flood emerges alongside the details of the massive rescue and relief operation - one of the largest ever mounted in the United States. The title, Deep'n as It Come, is a phrase from Cora Lee Campbell's earthy description of the approaching water, which, Daniel writes, "moved at a pace of some fourteen miles per day," and, in its movement and sound, "had the eeriness of a full eclipse of the sun, unsettling, chilling." "The contradictions of sorrow and humor,... death and salvation, despair and hope, calm and panic - all reveal the human dimension" in this compassionate and unforgettable portrait of common people confronting a great natural disaster.

"Lost Revolutions explores a time of startling turbulence and change in the South, years that have often been dismissed as placid and dull. In the wake of World War II, southerners anticipated a peaceful and prosperous future, but as Pete Daniel demonstrates, the road into the 1950s took some unexpected turns. The South that emerged in the twenty years after the war grew out of displacement, conflict, and creativity - not tranquility.". "Daniel chronicles the myriad forces that turned the world southerners had known upside down in the postwar period. In chapters that explore such subjects as the civil rights movement, segregation, and school integration; the breakdown of traditional agriculture and the ensuing rural-urban migration; gay and lesbian life; and the emergence of rock 'n' roll music and stock car racing, as well as the triumph of working-class culture, he reveals that the 1950s South was a place with the potential for revolutionary change.". "In the end, however, the progressive forces for change were largely diverted and the chance for significant transformation squandered. Lost opportunities littered the southern landscape in the years between the end of World War II and the Freedom Summer of 1964, Daniel says."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Shadow of Slavery argues that peonage has been an important and continuing theme in the history of postbellum southern labor. Few historians have incorporated involuntary servitude into their works, while those who have are divided over the importance of the subject and how it fits into the broader themes of southern labor history."--From book cover.