James C. Cobb is B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor in the History of the American South at the University of Georgia. His numerous publications include Redefining Southern Culture, The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity, and Away Down South.
'Cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed,' Rupert Vance called it in 1935. 'Nowhere but in the Mississippi Delta,' he said, 'are antebellum conditions so nearly preserved.' This crescent of bottomlands between Memphis and Vicksburg, lined by the Yazoo and Missi...[SEE MORE]