Nell Irvin Painter
In American Congo Nan Woodruff very rightly places the Mississippi Delta and its racialized political economy in international context. No longer does this heavily black, white supremacist plantation region float in American (and southern) exceptionalism. Her Delta belongs to the colonized world of the twentieth century, rising and failing in rhythm with the colonies of Asia and Africa as a result of the same world wars. In the Delta as in other colonies, struggle proves long, but also fruitful.
— Nell Irvin Painter, author of
Southern History Across the Color Line
Jack Temple Kirby
Nan Woodruff has brilliantly validated the NAACP's eighty-year old evocation of the gothic horror of Leopold II's Congo in the lower Mississippi Valley's cotton plantation complex. Her book is one harrowing read, leavened by the stunning heroism of indomitable resistance.
— Jack Temple Kirby, author of
Rural Worlds Last: The American South, 1920-1960
From the Publisher
Woodruff has vividly recreated the brutal local history of the Delta and persuasively situated that history in the context of national politics, global economics, and world wars. This book should be required reading for students of Southern, African American, and labor history.—David Montgomery, author of Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United Stores with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century
In American Congo Nan Woodruff very rightly places the Mississippi Delta and its racialized political economy in international context. No longer does this heavily black, white supremacist plantation region float in American (and southern) exceptionalism. Her Delta belongs to the colonized world of the twentieth century, rising and falling in rhythm with the colonies of Asia and Africa as a result of the same world wars. In the Delta as in other colonies, struggle proves long, but also fruitful.—Nell Irvin Painter, author of Southern History Across the Color Line
Nan Woodruff has brilliantly validated the NAACP's eighty-year old evocation of the gothic horror of Leopold II's Congo in the lower Mississippi Valley's cotton plantation complex. Her book is one harrowing read, leavened by the stunning heroism of indomitable resistance.—Jack Temple Kirby, author of Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960
David Montgomery
Woodruff has vividly recreated the brutal local history of the Delta and persuasively situated that history in the context of national politics, global economics, and world wars. This book should be required reading for students of Southern, African American, and labor history.
— David Montgomery, author of
Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United Stores with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century
