Search results for ""Author Steven Cox""

When Sunflowers Bloomed Red is a welcome addition to the history of the American Midwest that should have appeal to students, scholars, and general readers.—Greg Hall, Annals of Iowa When Sunflowers Bloomed Red offers readers entry into the Kansas radical tradition and shows how the Great Plains agrarian movement influenced and transformed politics and culture in the twentieth century and beyond. When Sunflowers Bloomed Red reveals the origins of agrarian radicalism in the late nineteenth-century United States. Great Plains radicals, particularly in Kansas, influenced the ideological principles of the Populist movement, the U.S. labor movement, American socialism, American syndicalism, and American communism into the mid-twentieth century. Known as the American Radical Tradition, members of the Greenback Labor Party and the Knights of Labor joined with Prohibitionists, agrarian Democrats, and progressive Republicans to form the Great Plains Populist Party (later the People’s Party) in the 1890s. The Populists called for the expansion of the money supply through the free coinage of silver, federal ownership of the means of communication and transportation, the elimination of private banks, universal suffrage, and the direct election of U.S. senators. They also were the first political party to advocate for familiar features of modern life, such as the eight-hour workday for agrarian and industrial laborers, a graduated income tax system, and a federal reserve system to manage the nation’s money supply. When the People’s Party lost the hotly contested election of 1896, members of the party dissolved into socialist and other left-wing parties and often joined efforts with the national Progressive movement.

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Emma Bell Miles (1879–1919) was a gifted writer, poet, naturalist, and artist with a keen perspective on Appalachian life and culture. She and her husband Frank lived on Walden’s Ridge in southeast Tennessee, where they struggled to raise a family in the difficult mountain environment. Between 1908 and 1918, Miles kept a series of journals in which she recorded in beautiful and haunting prose the natural wonders and local customs of Walden’s Ridge. Jobs were scarce, however, and as the family’s financial situation deteriorated, Miles began to sell literary works and paintings to make ends meet. Her short stories appeared in national magazines such as Harper’s Monthly and Lippincott’s, and in 1905 she published Spirit of the Mountains, a nonfiction book about southern Appalachia. After the death of her three-year-old son from scarlet fever in 1913, the journals took a more somber turn as Miles documented the difficulties of mountain life, the plight of women in rural communities, the effect of disparities of class and wealth, and her own struggle with tuberculosis. Previously examined only by a handful of scholars, the journals contain both poignant and incisive accounts of nature and a woman’s perspective on love and marriage, death customs, child raising, medical care, and subsistence on the land in southern Appalachia in the early twentieth century. With a foreword by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, this edited selection of Emma Bell Miles’s journals is illustrated with examples of her painting.

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