Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South
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Description
Erin Mauldin has been awarded the Wiley-Silver Prize for 2019. Her work Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South, was published in 2018 by Oxford University Press. Using insights from environmental history to re-examine the crucial decades between 1840 and 1880, Mauldin reveals new ways to conceive of the war's place in the trajectory of southern agriculture. The four-year conflict and its emancipation of slaves dramatically transformed how farmers thought about, manipulated, and organized their land. Altered methods of land use and rapidly shifting natural processes amplified the well-known dislocations of the postbellum era: shortages of capital, racial prejudice, and repressive crop legislation. All these elements are essential to understanding postwar developments and, ultimately, the outlines of the New South. Restoring the land to the study of land and labor recovers an important piece of a large and complicated narrative. Dr. Mauldin is a graduate of Georgetown University and currently is an assistant professor of history at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg.
Publication Date
10-1-2019
Relational Format
Book
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Recommended Citation
Mauldin, Erin Stuart, "Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South" (2019). Wiley-Silver Prize. 6.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/wiley-silver/6
