Being a sharecropper or raising cotton in 1875 in Mississippi is exhausting, demeaning and destroys personal initiative. Being a share cropper might mean that you will have a little something left over for yourself if you have a very good crop. But without good crops, you will have nothing. My family and I work in the fields from sun up to sundown. We don’t own the land we work on. Our owner lets us grow crops on his land and takes a percentage of any profit. Sometimes we make enough money to have enough to eat and clothe ourselves. But it is more often that we just barely scrimp by. We eat what we can grow and on occasion, we can kill a chicken that we have raised. It is not a life you would wish on anyone.
Yes, back then thousands of years ago everyone traded to get what they are needed.
People needed food to eat from the farmers. Without food people could starve.
The American dream. A husband who holds the job, wife that takes care of the kids, and one or two kids
The enlightenment was a period of new ideas and world views fed by a better understanding of the world and our place in it
