When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land

For readers of The Sum of Us and South to America, an essential new look at the roots of American inequality-and the seeds of its transformation

Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country's economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted for the sins of the South, portrayed as a regional backwater that willfully cleaved itself from the modern world. But buried beneath the weight of good ol' boy politics and white-washed histories lies the ...