Louis Mazzari brings to the fore one of the most important figures of the southern regionalist movement in the New Deal era. His is the first biography of Arthur Raper, a progressive sociologist, writer, and public intellectual who advocated racial and social justice in the South when such views were not only unpopular but dangerous, effectively laying a foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Raper was one of the first white southern scholars to speak out against lynching, sharecropping, and tenant farming in his pioneering and highly influential books The...
Louis Mazzari brings to the fore one of the most important figures of the southern regionalist movement in the New Deal era. His is the first biogr...
A social scientist and public intellectual, Arthur Raper (1899-1979) advocated unpopular solutions to combat the shortcomings of race relations and economic stagnation in the South. Originally published in 1936, Preface to Peasantry confirmed Raper's place in the Chapel Hill Southern Regionalist movement of the 1930s and 1940s and elaborated his belief that New Deal federal planning could create progressive social policies. Adroitly juxtaposing themes of history and sociology, Preface to Peasantry is a text both descriptive of a broad phenomenon and prescriptive of policymaking to address the...
A social scientist and public intellectual, Arthur Raper (1899-1979) advocated unpopular solutions to combat the shortcomings of race relations and ec...