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Tag Archives: Brooks Blevins

Another Good Year

10 Thursday Mar 2022

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Arkansas, History, Missouri, Ozarks, Rural

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Agriculture, Arkansas, books, Brooks Blevins, history, History of the Ozarks, John T. Woodruff, Missouri, Ozarks, Vance Randolph

It has already been another good year for writing from the Ozarks, and it’s only March. I have several books that I plan to write about in the coming days, but a good place to start is with this one, the third volume of Brooks Blevins’ History of the Ozarks.

Subtitled “The Ozarkers,” this volume takes us into the late 20th century, what we might call the modern history of the Ozarks. And there’s something in it for everyone.

The book opens with the legendary 1934 contretemps between Springfield businessman John T. Woodruff and folklorist Vance Randolph at the first-ever regional folk festival in the Ozarks, during which Woodruff accused Randolph and his associates of tarnishing the image of the Ozarks with their descriptions of Ozarkers as ignorant hillbillies, superstitious, barefoot moonshiners who idled away their days waiting for the next opportunity to coon hunt. The fact that Randolph’s portrayal came from actual interviews with actual Ozarkers, of course, was a difficulty to this accusation. But the conflict presages and sets the theme for the book: the divide between the modern Ozarks as perceived and the modern Ozarks as lived.

The “real” Ozarks have never been a place as simple as Dogpatch, U.S.A., and we all know that. This book shows just how complicated the history of the real Ozarks has been, with waves of immigration and internal migration, a constantly shifting economy based on the extractive industries of mining, farming, and timber, and an array of conflicting perceptions both from outside and within. So much has happened within the last century in the Ozarks that the book has to move swiftly from incident to incident and theme to theme, and sometimes I wished for it to slow down and devote more time to the things I am interested in the most; but such is the nature of historical writing. The book clocks in at about 300 pages and could easily have been three times that long, and still wouldn’t have covered everything.

One section I especially appreciated was its careful delineation of the changing agricultural economy. When I was a kid growing up in Madison and Reynolds counties, the typical farm was very much “mixed agriculture”: a pen full of hogs, a field with a few dozen cattle, a chickenhouse, maybe some row crops in the bottomland, even sometimes a specialty crop like sorghum or ducks. That model has nearly disappeared these days, replaced by farms that are strictly pasture-and-cattle or rows of giant chicken or turkey sheds (or occasionally, feeder pig operations) with the farm operator in a feudal contract with one of the big poultry juggernauts. Dairy farming has nearly disappeared. The societal impacts of these economic changes are hard to see at first, but when you consider them carefully, one obvious implication is that it becomes harder and harder to maintain a self-sufficient life in the remoter regions as farming becomes more dependent on connections to the larger industrial-agriculture machine. Thus rural counties empty out while population centers remain viable. In addition, these large operations, which seek to minimize labor costs through mechanization, rely on low-skill immigrant populations for their workers, leading to the pockets of impoverished immigrants we see in places like Noel and Aurora. The ripple effects of this demographic shift are hard to miss.

A History of the Ozarks: Volume 3 is now resting on my shelf alongside the other two volumes, but I don’t expect it to stay there long. It’s going to be taken down again and again as I re-read its accounts of Ozark historical events and refresh my understanding of the region’s rich, troubled, and treasured history.

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Favorite Ozarks Books – 13

17 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in Arkansas, History, Missouri, Ozarks

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Brooks Blevins, Civil War, history, Ozarks, reconstruction, slavery, war

History Ozarks - 2

I’ve written earlier about the first volume of Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, which was a most welcome addition to my bookshelf. The second volume came out this fall, and I’ve been working through it; I’m happy to say that I like it even better than the first.

Subtitled “The Conflicted Ozarks,” this volume takes us through the history of the Ozarks during the Civil War into the troubled years afterward, ending after the great timber boom of the 1880s. A third volume that will bring us into the modern years is promised.

A particularly illuminating part of this book is its treatment of slavery in the pre-Civil War Ozarks. I grew up hearing the common phrase that slavery in our part of the country “wasn’t that bad” because slaveowners typically owned only one or two slaves, rather than participating in the large-scale plantation system that existed farther south. According to this view, “slaves were treated as part of the family” and were happier with their condition than the unlucky slaves of the Deep Confederacy. Blevins addresses this conception with sensitivity, noting the essential differences between slavery in the Ozarks and other areas of the country, but also pointing out that even small-scale slavery is still slavery, and that slaveowners of the Ozarks, like slaveowners elsewhere, didn’t hesitate to break up slave families through the sale of spouses and children when it suited their economic interest. In fact, because of its intimacy, Ozarks slaveowning could evolve into deep personal animosity and mistreatment, with all the power on one side of the equation.

The book also gives a comprehensive cross-border treatment of the war itself. We tend to hear about the Civil War in the Ozarks from a single-state viewpoint, or even from a narrower one such as the history of the war in a particular region or from the perspective of a unit or campaign; it’s helpful to read about the war in a broader context. Similarly, the diverging paths of Missouri and Arkansas after the war are well described, along with ways in which the two states remained similar.

The first volume of this trilogy was challenged by its scope; covering prehistory, early Native American history, the colonial period, and the years of American rule up to the beginning of the Civil War is a daunting task. This volume, with its much more confined time period, feels tighter and more narratively coherent, and the vast increase in number and type of source material makes itself felt as well, with Blevins bringing in all kinds of material, from official documents to personal letters and diaries. The breadth of research is just a thrill.

Like its predecessor, this book belongs on the shelf of anybody who wants to be a serious student of Ozark history.

 

A Good Year in Ozarks Writing – Already

03 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by stevewiegenstein in History, Literature, Ozarks, Writing

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books, Brooks Blevins, history, literature, Ozarks, Phil Howerton, University of Arkansas Press, University of Illinois Press

2019 has barely begun, and I can already tell that it’s going to be a banner year for writing about the Ozarks.

I’ve been working my way through the first volume of Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, entitled The Old Ozarks, and it’s a grand piece of work. Richly sourced, comprehensive, and adroitly written, it is the history we’ve all been waiting for. I’m eagerly waiting for the second and third volumes to appear so I can snatch them up, too. If you are interested in the Ozarks, or interested in history, you must get this book – or at least make sure your library has a copy.

History of the Ozarks

And then next month, another landmark book will hit the shelves: The Literature of the Ozarks, a comprehensive anthology edited by Phil Howerton of Missouri State – West Plains. It’s been a long time since anyone attempted an Ozarks literary anthology, and I can’t remember if anyone has ever put together one of this magnitude, stretching from the early 19th century to the present day. It’s being published by the University of Arkansas Press, and although I haven’t seen a physical copy yet, I’ve seen the table of contents, and it’s magnificent. I say this with a blush, since a selection from one of my books is included. I’m thrilled to be among the company.

Literature of the Ozarks

Two days into the new year, and already a memorable one. I’m eager to see what other reading treats await.

Two Books

26 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by stevewiegenstein in History, Literature, Missouri, Ozarks

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Aaron Ketchell, Arkansas, Branson, Brooks Blevins, Missouri, Missouri State University, murder, Ozarks, religion

ghost-of-the-ozarks
holy-hills

I’ve been reading a couple of books this month–Brooks Blevins’ Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South and Aaron Ketchell’s Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri. I’ve followed Brooks’ work for a long time, but Ketchell’s book is new to me.

Ghost of the Ozarks is the story of one of the strangest murder trials in Ozarks history, a 1929 case in Mountain View, Arkansas, in which the supposed “victim” showed up during the investigation but whose identity was doubted by the prosecutors, who went on with the trial despite the presence of the “victim” as a defense witness. Holy Hills of the Ozarks examines the religious foundations of Branson’s entertainment tourism industry, starting with Harold Bell Wright and working from there to 2007, the date of the book’s publication.

Both are academic works, so I can’t recommend them for casual or light reading, but they’re both terrific pieces of scholarship. It’s reassuring to know that the shelf of books in Ozarks Studies is really quite impressive, once you start hunting around.

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