Julia Brock, "Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South" (UNC Press, 2025)

·51 min·5 clips

How did northern sportsmen buying Southern land after the Civil War reshape hunting laws and upset local communities?

Julia Brock, an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama, joins host Craig Gill to discuss her new book 'Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South'. The book examines the evolution of hunting and fishing regulations in the U.S. South from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Brock explains that her research originated from a public history project on quail hunting plantations in the Red Hills region of Georgia and Florida. She argues that game and fish laws were part of a broader post-Civil War enclosure movement, restricting access to commons and reinforcing private property rights. The episode delves into the role of northern sportsmen who bought Southern land for estates, influencing local laws and economies. Brock highlights key figures: John H. Wallace Jr., Alabama's first game commissioner, who used national models and racial rhetoric to pass laws; Charlie Young, an African-American hunting guide whose reminiscences provide insight into Black labor and independence; and Fannie Cook, a white woman in Mississippi who leveraged New Deal funding to establish a game and fish commission in the 1930s. The conversation covers the resistance from rural communities to new regulations, low enforcement rates, and the shift from sustenance to recreational hunting. Brock also mentions contemporary hunter Darrell Smith's work to document African-American hunting culture. She notes recent scholarship by other historians on similar themes and discusses the lasting impacts of these laws on land access and hunting demographics in the South today.

As heard by us

A close look at Alabama game law, conservation policy, and racialized politics.

Closed Seasons frames hunting regulation in Alabama as more than conservation policy: it also reads as political strategy. The episode centers the 1907 state game and fish commission and follows measures including closed seasons, a ban on the sale of game, songbird protection,…

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Alabama game laws, where conservation and racial politics share the same machinery.

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