Reviews

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Recommended.
--Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

Serves the discipline well in redirecting attention back to the land when examining African American life and culture. It also highlights the often-neglected landowners of color as individuals worthy of close attention, despite their minority status within American culture. The essays are solidly researched and written, and are of uniformly high quality. A very satisfying collection on every front.
--American Historical Review

Presents the scope and complexity of landownership among black farmers following emancipation.
--Missouri Historical Review

Provides a potent counter-narrative to the story of African Americans only as sharecroppers. These richly documented essays add depth and complexity to the little-known story of African American landowners.
--The Journal of American History

Targets a startlingly understudied subject in both agriculture and African American history, proving how landownership and farming fostered empowerment, innovation, and pride among many black people, rather than representing agricultural life as another form of slavery, confinement, and oppression.
--The Journal of Southern History

Leaves the reader with a complicated and multilayered picture of black rural landowners in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries... the volume explores a range of topics, from historiography to black rural politics to the current challenges faced by black farmers.
--Agricultural History

Coheres almost seamlessly. Every essay touches on some aspect of black land-owning farming experience and does so in a thoughtful and analytically sound fashion.
--Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas

A credible text on African American landowners and farmers . . . . this book adds another important layer to the intersection of race and class in the nation.
--Florida Historical Quarterly

A rousing success. . . . Pull[s] landowning black farmers from the shadows, illustrate[s] their ubiquity and social significance, and demonstrate[s] the possibilities for further research.
--North Carolina Historical Review

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