“When Depression-era social worker Catherine S. Barker’s Yesterday Today was first published in 1941, she described her federal relief clients in the rural Arkansas Ozarks as ‘people well worth knowing.’ In this new edition, editor J. Blake Perkins provides an explanation of the life and times of Barker, shedding light on her filtered perceptions of 1930s Ozarkers struggling to make ends meet. Perkins shows us that Barker, too, was a person ‘well worth knowing’ and that Yesterday Today is a book well worth reading.”
—Susan Young, Shiloh Museum of Ozark History
“Unlike Vance Randolph and other contemporaries whose work is marked by rural romanticism, Barker offers an unvarnished account of life in the Ozarks through its unflinching depiction of rural poverty. Although her book has largely been overlooked in the years since her death in 1961, Barker’s account offers a rare glimpse of a pivotal time in the Ozarks for those who wish to better understand one of the most misunderstood regions in America.”
—Missouri Historical Review, Vol. 114, No. 4, July 2020