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Southeastern Geographer Vol. 24. No. 2, November 1984, pp. 126-129 Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980. David R. Goldfield. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. xiv and 232 pp., maps, plates, bibliography and index. $20. cloth. (ISBN 0-8071-1029-9) An American trait is a sense of attachment to a geographic region. This sense of place generates an emotional state in many southerners. The circumstances that brought on this mental attitude and way of behavior of southerners is an underlying theme of Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers, a book, more urban history than urban geography, that needed to have been written, and having been written is to be read by those who have an interest in the South. And irrespective of one's sense of place, the reader will find the book informative. In Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers, David R. Goldfield chose not to examine primary source materials but to synthesize a plethora of secondary works drawn primarily from history, geography, and sociology to develop the theme of a unique southern urban environment molded and transcended through time by a rural life style, race, and colonial economy. Rural values shaped by the natural environment, family, and religion made urban life conservative. The biracial society devalued human capital, discouraged immigration, and encouraged low level occupations . And the colonial economy fostered a growth ethic by which southern cities emerged as primarily collection points for staple agriculture and as commerce funnels for their northern cousins. The regional constraint of the book is the original Confederacy, excluding Oklahoma, but including Kentucky. The book is organized into an introduction—"City and Region," four chapters, and "Bibliographical Essay." In Chapter I, "Pearls on the Coast and Lights in the Forest: The Colonial Era," the key to anemic colonial cities was "geography" rather than crop cultivation. Primary coastal centers, linked to the interior by rivers, dominated the urban pattern. Commercial ties with Europe encouraged plantations to bypass interior and coastal towns. The evidence presented supports the conHoward G. Adkins, Department of Geography, Marshall University, Huntington , WV 25701. Vol. XXIV, No. 2 127 elusion that the direction taken in the colonial period molded the character of the southern city and urbanization. An initial impression after reading Chapter II, "Urbanization Without Cities: The Antebellum Era" just may well be the dictum 'So what's new, now that cotton had put a curtain around the South.' The advantages in staple crop production enabled the South to maintain economic equality until about 1830, while the character of the nation's economy was regional, but thereafter as the economic structure of the country emerged national in scope the South dropped into a hinterlandperiphery status and did not share equally. The urban base expanded; however, the urban population was diffused in small, fragile towns with clearly defined and limited market areas. Urban government and leadership in the antebellum era was predominately mercantile. Because their motivation was to secure and maintain the business of the countryside , they functioned within the psychological limits established by the region's rural society and fiscal frugality in matters of public expenditures for civic problems that did not enhance commerce. After all, free blacks and slaves comprised anywhere from 25 to 66 percent of the population of southern cities. Unfortunately, Goldfield devotes too little space to the internal structure of the city, and to urban slaves and urban free blacks. In Chapter III, "The Old South Under New Conditions: 18611920 ," things had changed but somehow they were still much the same. The South became even more southern, with the regional furor over agriculture, blacks, and Yankees directing the course of urbanization. Cities were rebuilt from the destruction of war, but there was no economic renaissance; sharecroppers, crop lein, tenancy, the country store, one crop cultivation, and northern investment in labor intensive and low wage industries contributed to the urban life style. Birmingham, a child of the New South, threatened to upset the South's role in the national economy with its steel production without relying on northern connections. This potential threat that could have been a regional capital -generating enterprise capable of spawning non-traditional urban places was squashed by monopolistic interests in...

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