Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers' Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880-1890.

Michael Schwartz's book is really three books in one an analysis of the structural changes that produced one of the most oppressive social systems the world has known (the one-crop cotton tenancy economy and the system of institutionalized racism and authoritarian one-party politics that was required to preserve the fragile economic arrangement); a theoretical analysis of the origins, mobilization, and outcome of insurgent challenges; and a meticulous application of that theory to the rise and collapse of the Populist movement.