As urbanization, emancipation, and the expansion of capitalized farming transformed the American landscape between 1800 and 1920, tenancy rates spiked in crowded cities, Southern cotton and tobacco fields, and Midwestern corn and wheat farms. Tenancy was neither the inevitable outcome of market forces, nor a hegemonic order imposed by a powerful few. Rather, its structures emerged from above and below. It emerged from thousands of small and large decisions made by politicians, judges, and attorneys, who expanded the role of law as a tool for growing the economy and widening opportunity for white men, while confining the rights of “racialized others” and women to participate equally in political, social, and economic life. It also emerged from the demands of white men of small property, who hoped tenancy could provide a path toward upward mobility, civic equality, and control over their households, and from complicated political negotiations between landed and commercial interests. And, it emerged from the legal and extralegal maneuvers of the dispossessed—freedpeople, single women, immigrants—who depended on tenancies as a way to secure a measure of independence. By comparing how landlord-tenant relations adapted to and shaped the political economy and hierarchies of race, gender, and class in the North, South, and Midwest, this project has recovered tenancy’s elusive place amid this process of legal transformation.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
History
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Farm tenancy--United States
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Land tenure--Law and legislation--United States
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
Identifier
ETD_6638
PhysicalDescription
Form (authority = gmd)
electronic resource
InternetMediaType
application/pdf
InternetMediaType
text/xml
Extent
1 online resource (viii, 354 p. : ill.)
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
Note (type = statement of responsibility)
by Adam Jacob Wolkoff
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Graduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = local)
rucore19991600001
Location
PhysicalLocation (authority = marcorg); (displayLabel = Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
AssociatedObject
Type
License
Name
Author Agreement License
Detail
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