Publisher's Synopsis
Washington County, located on the Mississippi River in the heart of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, is the culture that cotton built.Founded by hearty pioneers willing to risk even their lives for the unexcelled wealth that the "white gold" of cotton promised, the county was literally carved out of a swampy, cane-covered wilderness where the brave were as likely to reap an early grave as elaborate grandeur. This collection of more than two hundred photographs from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth depicts the unique and pervasive dichotomies that the struggle to weave the "Cotton Kingdom" produced, especially the twin threads of prosperity and poverty. Here men struck it rich in an unprecedented short time, but here they lost it just as quickly. While high cotton bought white men opulent homes and the leisure to produce literary classics, simultaneously it bought the black man little more than a shotgun shack and the pa
