The Great Depression emboldened Americans to tolerate radical experimentation in search of solutions to seemingly overwhelming economic problems. Amongst the thorniest of those was rural southern poverty. In Trouble in Goshen, Fred C. Smith focuses on three communities designed and implemented to meet that challenge. This book examines the economic and social theories―and their histories―that resulted in the creation and operation of the most aggressive and radical experiments in the United States. Trouble in Goshen chronicles three communitarian experiments, both the administrative details and the struggles and reactions of the clients. Smith covers the Tupelo Homesteads in Mississippi, the Dyess Colony in Arkansas, and the Delta Cooperative Farm, also in Mississippi. The Tupelo Homesteads were created under the aegis of the tiny Division of Subsistence Homesteads, a short-lived, “first New Deal” agency. Dyess Colony was the largest of the Resettlement Administration’s efforts to transform failed farmers into Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. The third community, the Delta Cooperative Farm, a product of the active cooperation between the Socialist Party of America and a cadre of liberal churchmen led by Reinhold Niebuhr, attempted to meld the pieties, passions, propaganda, and theories of Jesus and Marx. The equipment, facilities, and management styles of the projects reveal a clearly delineated class order among the poor. Trouble in Goshen demonstrates the class conscious angst that enveloped three distinct levels of poverty and the struggles of plain folk to preserve their tenuous status and avoid overt peasantry.

Product Description: “This book tells what it means to be a woman when you are poor, when you are proud, and when you are a hillbilly.”First published in 1973, Skye Moody’s Hillbilly Women shares the stunning and raw oral histories of 19 women in 20th-century Southern Appalachia, from their day-to-day struggles for survival to the personal triumphs of their hardscrabble existence...read more

Product Description: The overall theme of this book concerns the multiplicity and complexities of discursive constructions of water in Western economies in relation to irrigation communities. The authors argue that the politics of place is given meaning in relation to local knowledges and within multiple and multiscalar institutional frameworks involved with the social, physical, economic and political practices associated with water...read more

Statutory authorities frequently face anxieties in the management of families where previous fatal child abuse has occurred. The principles and practices set down here should provide both managers and practitioners with a way forward.

Product Description: From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans...read more