Judged by its misleading title, the reader might expect this book to address the cotton-growing regions of the South from Reconstruction through much of the twentieth century. Instead, Jarod Roll's well-researched study focuses on cotton development in the Boothill, a seven-county area of southeast Missouri, between 1910 and the mid-1940s. Aspiring to become self-sufficient, independent producers, African American and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers, Roll argues, migrated to the region's newly drained swamps and cleared forests where for thirty years they struggled to resist forms of capitalist development that threatened to confine them permanently to wage labour. While racism often divided and segregated black and white producers, they found ideological support for their ‘agrarian producerism’ (p. 57) in Pentecostalism, and for some whites also in socialism, both of which addressed feelings of powerlessness and shared a producerist emphasis on hard work, thrift and economic autonomy. The Universal Negro Improvement Association's appeal to ‘mainly prosperous’ (p. 54) African Americans in the Boothill during the 1920s similarly lay in producerism. Despite President Franklin D. Roosevelt's personal sympathy for uprooted tenants and sharecroppers, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration's subsidy payments to landowners encouraged them to evict their resident workforce in favour of mechanisation and day labour. Conflicts between the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) and a Congress of Industrial Organizations' (CIO) affiliate prevented a unified response by displaced agrarians who turned to these organisations for assistance. Nevertheless, STFU and CIO lobbying and a widely publicised roadside protest by black and white evictees in January 1939 led the federal Farm Security Administration (FSA) to create several segregated communities for landless farmers in the Boothill, and their inhabitants were able to buy their homes after conservatives forced the FSA to sell the sites. FSA programmes did not stop ‘eviction, demotion, and the shift to a wage labor system’ (p. 171) but tried instead to help landless farmers to adjust to its coming. Roll argues that by considering twentieth-century rural southerners primarily in terms of their urban migration historians have missed the vibrancy of determined, if ultimately unsuccessful, rural efforts to sustain producerism. Furthermore, he claims that his ‘story reveals a forgotten lineage of agrarian rebellion that linked Populism to the rise of civil rights unionism in the 1940s’ (p. 8) because many migrants brought to the urban labour unions that they joined ‘a spirit of radical religiosity, experience in community organizing, and belief in the responsibilities and power of the state’ (p. 179). However, his claim about linkages to civil rights unionism is supposition in need of evidence. Despite Roll's claim to have unearthed a lost tradition of southern rural resistance, his evidence does not extend beyond seven border state counties, and the STFU's efforts more widely are, in any case, well known to historians. Within the Boothill, Roll's evidence suggests that socialists and the UNIA achieved only minority support among those whom they sought to enlist, and the importance of religion in rural resistance during the 1930s is asserted rather than convincingly supported.