As the faithful found out (including me), the video of Gone with the Wind was damaged or the projector was not working correctly. Consequently the film was not shown. The film assignment for this course will be modified accordingly, and, instead of being responsible for four of five films, everyone is now responsible for three of the four. The next film isn't until March 27, and hopefully all the AV materials will be sorted out well in advance of then.

READ: in The South, a History.
Chapter 17: Economic Reconstruction. Pp. 401-424

in Major Problems in Southern History,
Chapter 3, Documents...

1. A Sharecropping Contract
2. A Crop lien
3. Nate Shaw's Story.

Pp. 58-65

From the Internet: Download and read: My Life and Travels by Levi Branham which you will locate at http://AMST430SOUTH.homestead.com/files/branhamlifeand_travels.html

As we have seen, the Civil War and its aftermath brought extreme dislocation to the emotional and social life of the South. It also created economic chaos, and out of that chaos new agricultural patterns revolving around the idea of sharecropping and tenant farming. This system absorbed the labor of both blacks and poor whites, and remained a fact of rural life most of the south until mechanization changed the face of southern agriculture. We will want to understand h9ow the system worked and the types of abuse to which it was subject.

Levi Branham's autobiography is a fascinating document, not because it is high literature, but because it recounts a life of wide experience narrated in a matter of fact manner. You'll notice that it is not very linear in its organization. But read it to understand much about the life of the slave and the life of the freed man during the period when the white classes struggled to reassert their dominance.

As I wrote in the introduction to this course, I am requiring a project as part of the course responsibilities, and I want to discuss your ideas regarding the project before I finalize it. I would like to use this class period to do that. I will distribute a sheet of some of my ideas on Tuesday the 5^th, and solicit your reactions and ideas of your own during this class. Here's your chance to shape your own future, so take advantage of it.

MID-TERM TAKE-HOME EXAMINATION

Due: Tuesday, March 12
Length: 6 pp. should cover it (typed, double spaced) I will read more, and I can deal with less if you are brilliantly concise.

Directions: Answer both parts.

Part One:

In the first section of the course we've investigated a number of factors which contribute to the uniqueness of the south as a region. What three do you think are most important and why? Consider among other possibilities geography, the agricultural system, the labor system, religion, intellectual ideas, free and slave social hierarchies, etc. etc. etc. As you explain your choices, impress me by references to the readings.

So far we've investigated three Southern "types", the Cavalier, the Yeoman, and the Cracker. Discuss and explain any two of them, illustrating them with examples from Birth of A Nation, the Diary of William Byrd, A. B. Longstreet's "The Fight" and G. W. Harris's "Sut Lovingood". (and from such other sources as you think appropriate).