There are few places on earth as thoroughly identified with a crop as the American South is with cotton. Burgundy is known for wine, and Java has coffee. In the South, for most of its history, cotton was king. Through much of the twentieth century, cotton cultivation determined nearly every aspect of life in the region. In Bale After Bale, leading historians and cultural critics offer multifaceted examinations and multimedia approaches to understanding the place of cotton in the twentieth-century South.

The essays in this collection examine the history of the hands that picked and processed cotton, the communities who celebrated cotton, the unions who organized cotton workers, the connections between cotton farmers in the South and banana farmers in Latin America, the portrayal of cotton in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, the poems and songs of the boll weevil, the role of cotton in blues music, the depiction of cotton on the silver screen, and the memories of people displaced by mechanical cotton pickers. As these essays demonstrate, understanding the nature of cotton's persistence into the twentieth century and the decline of the cotton economy are crucial to understanding the contemporary South and today's United States.