As the nineteenth century ended in Hunt County, Texas, a way of 
life was dying. The tightly knit, fiercely independent society of the 
yeomen farmers—"plain folk," as historians have often dubbed 
them—was being swallowed up by the rising tide of a rapidly 
changing, cotton-based economy. A social network based on family, 
religion, and community was falling prey to crippling debt and 
resulting loss of land ownership. For many of the rural people of 
Hunt County and similar places, it seemed like the end of the world.

    In Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists historian Kyle G. 
Wilkison analyzes the patterns of plain-folk life and the changes 
that occurred during the critical four decades spanning the end of the 
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Political 
protest evolved in the wake of the devastating losses experienced by 
the poor rural majority, and Wilkison carefully explores the interplay 
of religion and politics as Greenbackers, Populists, and Socialists 
vied for the support of the dispossessed tenant farmers and 
sharecroppers.

    With its richly drawn contextualization and analysis of the causes 
and effects of the epochal shifts in plain-folk society, Kyle G. 
Wilkison's Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists will reward 
students and scholars in economic, regional, and agricultural history.

_________________________________________________________

KYLE G. WILKISON teaches history at Collin College in Plano, 
Texas. His Ph.D. is from Vanderbilt University.


Number Thirty: Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West 
and Southwest


What people are saying about this book

"I have just about decided that Texas is a sorry state when it comes 
to the Poor man getting a Show."—tenant farmer Pinkney Bowie, 
1902