Creating a community that respected tradition but adapted to new circumstances.

Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region’s chief cash crop—tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South—as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. Giesen asks how the myth of the boll weevil’s lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region—those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. Boll Weevil Blues brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives in a novel and important way that allows us to reconsider the making of the modern American South.

The Belen Cutoff gave the AT&SF Railway a legitimate transcontinental freight line by eliminating the steep grades of Raton Pass. The Cutoff also transformed the eastern plains of New Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century, leading to New Mexico's most significant population increase as many homesteaders came to the region. This book tells that story by providing the perspectives of the AT&SF balanced by the experiences and narratives of railroad workers, homesteaders, and others. New research includes detailed consideration of internal railroad documents, local newspapers, and extensive oral-history interviews. As a result, this is the definitive account of the Belen Cutoff and provides a more complete and nuanced history of the region and the AT&SF Railway in New Mexico.