cotton farmers

Read about the importance of cotton in America's history and learn about the lives of people who picked it and worked with it.

Presents an overview of the history of the cotton industry in the United States, from colonial times to the mid-twentieth century.

In the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee, portrayed the lives of three sharecropper families in the South during the Depression, documenting the tyranny of the tenant farming system that enslaved some nine million tenants in 1936. Fifty years later, Maharidge and Williamson have revisited, photographed, and interviewed the surviving members and descendants of the families shown in that book.