Named one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles in its January 2008 issue.

Examining oral history narratives of more than five hundred farmers from all the southern states, Melissa Walker explores how farmers recall their agrarian past and the lessons that they draw from that past. These farmers understood that their way of life was passing--indeed many of them would be pushed off the land forever--and so they told stories to preserve a sense that their way of life mattered.

Landowners and sharecroppers; native-born farmers and immigrants, African Americans and whites; and men and women narrate the compelling story of how the rural South was modernized in the twentieth century. Southern Farmers and Their Stories tells the tale of southern rural transformation as it has never been told before--in the words of the farmers themselves.

Melissa Walker, associate professor of history at Converse College, is the author and editor of several books, including All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941, winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians.

Reviews:

"Walker's new work extends the grass-roots record of the depopulation of the southern countryside. Walker, like practitioners before her, presents a mostly declensionist rural/agricultural narrative, enriching her story with the words of her 531 subjects."--Jack Temple Kirby, Emeritus, Miami University, American Historical Review

"Brings together 475 interviews with 531 people, outlining what she calls 'communities of memory' in southern culture."--Harvard Book Review

"With exceptional care and intelligence, Melissa Walker weaves the words and life stories of black and white, well-to-do and hardscrabble farmers into one of the most humane and compelling accounts in print of the profound transformations in southern rural life during the twentieth century."--W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory

"This is a wonderful book that allows us to read about rural people making sense of their earlier lives in their own rich words. At at the same time, we get Walker's thoughtful, provocative analysis of those words and their meanings for understanding social transformation in the modernizing South and the confounding relationship between memory and history."--Michele Gillespie, Wake Forest University