Jess Usher Lecture Series--John Cable

Event Description:

Throwing People Away: The Enclosure Movement in Mississippi In the mid-twentieth century, the cotton South's most vulnerable farmers left the land in droves. Mechanization and consolidation left no place for these sharecroppers, tenants, and small landowners. To understand how and why southern elites and farm leaders displaced so many people in so short a time, we have to talk about the region's settler-colonial past and present. Focusing on Mississippi, this presentation asks how settler invasion and Indian Removal should inform our view of the so-called "southern enclosure movement."