The Boll Weevil Ball


Book Description

When a very, very small beetle decides to attend a ball, he won't let anything stop him -- not even the danger of being squished on the dance floor.




Hearings


Book Description







Agricultural Appropriations


Book Description







Boll Weevil Blues


Book Description

Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region’s chief cash crop—tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South—as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. Giesen asks how the myth of the boll weevil’s lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region—those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. Boll Weevil Blues brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives in a novel and important way that allows us to reconsider the making of the modern American South.










Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky


Book Description

A beautifully narrated novel of time and place, Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky re-creates a southern summer when the depression and the boll weevil turned hopes to dust. With the extraordinary talent to make the reader see the Ball canning jars on the kitchen table, hear the clicks on the party line, and feel the bittersweet moments of 20-year-old Callie Tatum's first experiences with adult desire, Oliver portrays a young wife's increasingly dangerous infidelity with cinematic precision and palpable suspense.




Some Bugs


Book Description

Originally published in 2014 by Beach Lane Books.




Recent Books