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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (373377)	7/17/2010 2:44:44 PM
From: Andrew N. Cothran	2 Recommendations Respond to of 793561

KLP: Andrew Jackson comes to mind but at least he was proud to be an American. PS: If you have some extra reading time this summer, you will do well to read John M Barry's definitive history of the greatest natural disaster in the USA, RISING TIDE: THE GREAT MISSISSIPPI FLOOD OF 1927 AND HOW IT CHANGED AMERICA. This book is really an introduction to modern America. The roots of our present life, social and political, are unveiled in this highly readable and thoroughly reliable history. Here is a brief description: In the spring of 1927, America witnessed perhaps its greatest natural disaster: a flood that profoundly changed race relations, government, and society in the Mississippi River valley region. John Barry (The Transformed Cell, LJ 9/1/92) presents here a fascinating social history of the effects of the massive flood. More than 30 feet of water stood over land inhabited by nearly one million people. Almost 300,000 African Americans were forced to live in refugee camps for months. Many people, both black and white, left the land and never returned. Using an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, Barry clearly traces and analyzes how the changes produced by the flood in the lower South came into conflict and ultimately destroyed the old planter aristocracy, accelerated black migration to the North, and foreshadowed federal government intervention in the region's social and economic life during the New Deal. His well-written work supplants Pete Daniel's Deep'n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi Flood (1977) as the standard work on the subject. I have just finished the hardback copy and could not put it aside once I began reading it until I was finished. I grew up in the South, having been born two years after the flood in South Mississippi so much of the book is a recreation of the South of my childhood. But it is more than that. It is an introduction to the forces that shaped modern American, including the good, the bad and the ugly. The 1927 Mississippi Flood makes Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath look like nothing more than a extended weekend downpour,