The Cotton Kingdom

      Between the spring of 1998 and summer of 2000 Barbara Ehrenreich worked as a minimum wage employee at various jobs.  Her goal was to show the challenges that people faced in the United States that were living on a minimum wage salary.  Ehrenreich wanted Americans to gain a greater understanding to the challenges that many people were facing in their own community.   Her book became a bestseller and received both praise and criticism from various organizations and groups in the U.S.  

    Nickel and Dimed is an excellent modern day example of investigative journalism, when an outsider travels to a community to expose problems or issues that are occurring.  There have been many famous investigative journalists in American History, one of them Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote about Southern culture for a Northern audience.

     A publisher in London asked Frederick Law Olmsted to revise three travel essays that he had written previously and turn them into a book that was about Southern Culture.  Olmsted saw this as an opportunity to highlight how much progress had occurred in the North while also detailing the evils of slavery.  His book was published in 1861, right at the beginning of the Civil War.   The Cotton Kingdom became a best seller in Europe as well as the North and has provided historians with an excellent study of the economics of slavery.