Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, students of social anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, then at Harvard University and later at the University of Chicago, lived among the people of Natchez, Mississippi for over 18 months investigating how class and caste informed daily life in a typical southern community. The study they produced not only provides a snapshot of the state of social science in the US at the time, but also makes available to modern scholars early primary material collected by trained participant observers. They found, as many have since, that intertwined social and economic inequalities lay at the root of racial tensions. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)