{"product_id":"to-know-the-soul-of-a-people-9780190082697","title":"To Know the Soul of a People","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo Know the Soul of a People is a history of religion and race in the agricultural South before the Civil Rights era. Jamil W. Drake chronicles a cadre of social scientists who studied the living conditions of black rural communities, revealing the abject poverty of the Jim Crow south. These university-affiliated social scientists documented shotgun houses, unsanitary privies and contaminated water, scaly hands, enlarged stomachs, and malnourished bodies. However, they also turned their attention to the spiritual possessions, chanted sermons, ecstatic singing, conjuration, dreams and visions, fortune-telling, taboos, and other religious cultures of these communities. These scholars aimed to illuminate the impoverished conditions of their subjects for philanthropic and governmental organizations, as well as the broader American public, in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the Great Depression. Religion was integral to their efforts to chart the long economic depression across the South.From 1924 to 1941, Charles Johnson, Guy Johnson, Allison Davis, Lewis Jones, and other social scientists framed the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as folk practices, aiming to reform them and the broader South. Drawing on their correspondence, fieldnotes, and monographs, Drake shows that social scientists'' use of folk reveals the religion was an important site for highlighting the supposed mental, moral, and cultural deficits of America''s so-called folk population. Moreover, these social scientists did not just pioneer rural social science and reform but used their study of religion to plant the seeds of the concept that would become known as the culture of poverty in the latter half of the twentieth century. To Know the Soul of a People is an exciting intellectual history that invites us to explore the knowledge that animated the earnest yet shortsighted liberal efforts to reform black and impoverished communities.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDrake's well-written, important, timely examination of these pioneering studies is excellent.... Highly recommended. * CHOICE *\u003cbr\u003eDrake outlines with precision social scientific constructions of the category of 'folk religion' and demonstrates the significance of ideas about religion to liberal reformers' analyses of Black cultures, family, labor, and health. He shows how their analyses contributed to moralizing discourses about race and poverty and supported government policies aimed at 'modernizing' Black culture. The book provides new tools to understand the connections among religion, race, and class in African American history. * Judith Weisenfeld, Author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration *\u003cbr\u003eJamil Drake follows Depression-era social scientists who spread across the rural U.S. South-particularly the Black rural South-in search of an explanation for its entrenched poverty and resistance to modernization. They found 'folk religion,' a category that challenged biological racism but entrenched a cultural critique of poor black southerners that remains with us. This is a timely, sobering, and important book * Alison Greene, Associate Professor of American Religious History, Emory University *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePreface: The Legacy of Hampton: Folk, Religion, and Classifying the Cabin People   Introduction  Chapter 1: Moralizing the Folk: The Negro Problem, Racial Heredity, and Religion in the Progressive Era   Chapter 2: Assimilating the Folk: White Southern Liberals, Revival Religion, and Regional Isolation   Chapter 3: Medicalizing the Folk: Superstitions, Family, and Germs in the Venereal Disease Control Program   Chapter 4: Saving the Folk: Cultural Lag and the Southern Roots of the Religion of Poverty   Chapter 5: Preserving the Folk: Folk Songs and the Irony of Romanticism  Conclusion: The Aftermath of the Religion of Southern Folk  Bibliography  Index","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51017586180439,"sku":"9780190082697","price":22.32,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780190082697.jpg?v=1750774035","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/to-know-the-soul-of-a-people-9780190082697","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}