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American Exodus - The Dustbowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,965
Discovery Miles 19 650
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American Exodus - The Dustbowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (Hardcover)
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Total price: R1,985
Discovery Miles: 19 850
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Fifty years ago, John Steinbeck's now classic novel, The Grapes of
Wrath, captured the epic story of an Oklahoma farm family driven
west to California by dust storms, drought, and economic hardship.
It was a story that generations of Americans have also come to know
through Dorothea Lange's unforgettable photos of migrant families
struggling to make a living in Depression-torn California. Now in
James N. Gregory's pathbreaking American Exodus, there is at last
an historical study that moves beyond the fiction of the 1930s to
uncover the full meaning of these events.
American Exodus takes us back to the Dust Bowl migration of the
1930s and the war boom influx of the 1940s to explore the
experiences of the more than one million Oklahomans, Arkansans,
Texans, and Missourians who sought opportunities in California.
Gregory reaches into the migrants' lives to reveal not only their
economic trials but also their impact on California's culture and
society. He traces the development of an "Okie subculture" that
over the years has grown into an essential element in California's
cultural landscape.
Gregory vividly depicts how Southwesterners brought with them on
their journey west an allegiance to evangelical Protestantism,
"plain-folk American" values, and a love of country music. These
values gave Okies an expanding cultural presence their new home. In
their neighborhoods, often called "Little Oklahomas," they created
a community of churches and saloons, of church-goers and
good-old-boys, mixing stern-minded religious thinking with
hard-drinking irreverence. Today, Baptist and Pentecostal churches
abound in this region, and from Gene Autry, "Oklahoma's singing
cowboy," to Woody Guthrie, Bob Wills, and Merle Haggard, the
special concerns of Southwesterners have long dominated the country
music industry in California. The legacy of the Dust Bowl migration
can also be measured in political terms. Throughout California and
especially in the San Joaquin Valley Okies have implanted their own
brand of populist conservatism.
The consequences reach far beyond California. The Dust Bowl
migration was part of a larger heartland diaspora that has sent
millions of Southerners and rural Midwesterners to the nation's
northern and western industrial perimeter. American Exodus is the
first book to examine the cultural implications of that massive
20th-century population shift. In this rich account of the
experiences and impact of these migrant heartlanders, Gregory fills
an important gap in recent American social history.
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