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The American Cotton Planter and the Soil of the South

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Advertisement placed in the 1859 Montgomery Alabama city directory for The American Cotton Planter and the Soil of the South Monthly a "Southern Rural Magazine"

The American Cotton Planter and Soil of the South was an American monthly magazine for slave-owning American planters. It was the result of the 1857 merger of the periodicals The American Cotton Planter and The Soil of the South.[1] It was published in Montgomery, Alabama, at the printing offices of the Montgomery Advertiser.[2] The editor and publisher was Dr. N. B. Cloud.[3]

Topics covered in the magazine included soil erosion and the "impudence of the negroes".[4] Other topics included race purity as a factor in optimizing slave selection, perceived sleep habits of the slave, the value of the pea as a foodstuff for slaves, and how to resolve the problem of soil exhaustion.[5] Historian Walter Johnson describes The American Cotton Planter and similar works as "as a set of extended efforts to translate a practical knowledge that was most readily obtained by the field hands (and thus expropriated from them) into a set of visual terms—letters, words, charts, illustrations—which could be consumed through their owners' eyes".[5]

The predecessor publications, the American Cotton Planter and The Soil of the South ran from 1853 to 1856, and 1851 to 1857, respectively.[6][7] The American Cotton Planter and the Soil of the South ceased publication in 1861.[1]

References

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  1. ^ a b "The American Cotton Planter and Soil of the South archives". onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-06.
  2. ^ Mears & Turnbull (1859). City directory of Montgomery, Alabama, 1859 to 1860.
  3. ^ Mears & Turnbull (1859). City directory of Montgomery, Alabama, 1859 to 1860.
  4. ^ Moore, John Hebron (1988). The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770--1860. LSU Press. pp. 33, 106. ISBN 978-0-8071-1404-9.
  5. ^ a b Johnson, Walter (2013). River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-07490-3.
  6. ^ "The American Cotton Planter archives". onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-06.
  7. ^ "The Soil of the South archives". onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-06.