Agriculture And Slavery In Neil Foley's The White Scourge

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The Divided Nation

Agriculture has been one of the driving motors of this nation, since the foundation of the Thirteen Colonies, passing through the civil war arriving to our modern era, agricultures has been a crucial pillar of the success of this nation; Agriculture has shaped not only the economic roots of this nation, it has also shaped the racial ideology of what the of America is today; in a certain way, we can trace a few centuries back the origins of most of the racial problems that exist today in the country to the agricultural fields. This ideological division of the nation is show through all the history of the United States. The book The White Scourge by Neil Foley perfectly outlines this division and racism that was generated in the fields …show more content…

Foley gives the reader in the rural Texas of the 19 centuries. Trough is clear portrayal of the state situation, he takes us into the minds of this men and women that suffered the different ways of discrimination that was generated in the cotton agricultural industry in the state, even white people with a lesser economic power faced discrimination from the other white people; we can get a clear idea of the great invisible wall that was being painted around a small group of white individuals that in this case were the owners of the farm fields. After the civil war Foley explains how a system of farming was generated in Texas and all around the united states called sharecropper, this was a system in which the farmer gave the owner of the land a percentage

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