Brings together 475 interviews with 531 people, outlining what she calls 'communities of memory' in southern culture.
~Harvard Book Review
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
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
Named one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles in its January 2008 issue.
~Choice
"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, American Historical Review
Melissa Walker's purposes go beyond historical documentation to include the shaping of shared memories and the interplay of past and present in those memories. She has achieved her purposes, nowhere more dramatically than in evoking memories from the era when postwar prosperity and optimism gave way to stagflation and malaise in the countryside.
~Robert C. McMath, Labor History
Southern Farmers and Their Stories is an important contribution to the history of the twentieth-century rural south in terms of methodology and interpretation.
~Ginette Aley, Journal of Southern History
