Sharecropping in the context of "Audie Murphy"

The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was found throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, children were born into slavery, and an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing. Involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime remains legal.

By the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the status of enslaved people had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry. During and immediately following the Revolution, abolitionist laws were passed in most Northern states and a movement developed to abolish slavery. The role of slavery under the United States Constitution (1789) was the most contentious issue during its drafting. The Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution gave slave states disproportionate political power, while the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3) provided that, if a slave escaped to another state, the other state could not prevent the return of the slave to the person claiming to be his or her owner. All Northern states had abolished slavery to some degree by 1805, sometimes with completion at a future date, and sometimes with an intermediary status of unpaid indentured servitude.

The Italian diaspora (Italian: emigrazione italiana, pronounced [emiɡratˈtsjoːne itaˈljaːna]) is the large-scale emigration of Italians from Italy.

There were two major Italian diasporas in Italian history. The first diaspora began around 1880, two decades after the Unification of Italy, and ended in the 1920s to the early 1940s with the rise of Fascist Italy. Poverty was the main reason for emigration, specifically the lack of land as mezzadria sharecropping flourished in Italy, especially in the South, and property became subdivided over generations. Especially in Southern Italy, conditions were harsh. From the 1860s to the 1950s, Italy was still a largely rural society with many small towns and cities having almost no modern industry and in which land management practices, especially in the South and the Northeast, did not easily convince farmers to stay on the land and to work the soil. Another factor was related to the overpopulation of Italy as a result of the improvements in socioeconomic conditions after Unification. That created a demographic boom and forced the new generations to emigrate en masse in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, mostly to the Americas. The new migration of capital created millions of unskilled jobs around the world and was responsible for the simultaneous mass migration of Italians searching for "bread and work" (Italian: pane e lavoro, pronounced [ˈpaːne e llaˈvoːro]).

Pope John XXIII (born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli; 25 November 1881 – 3 June 1963) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City from 28 October 1958 until his death on 3 June 1963. He is the most recent pope to take the pontifical name "John".

Roncalli was among 13 children born to Marianna Mazzola and Giovanni Battista Roncalli in a family of sharecroppers who lived in Sotto il Monte, a village in the province of Bergamo, Lombardy. He was ordained to the priesthood on 10 August 1904 and served in a number of posts, as nuncio in France and a delegate to Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. In a consistory on 12 January 1953 Pope Pius XII made Roncalli a cardinal as the Cardinal-priest of Santa Prisca in addition to naming him as the Patriarch of Venice. Roncalli was unexpectedly elected pope on 28 October 1958 at age 76 after Pope Pius XII's death. Pope John XXIII surprised those who expected him to be a caretaker pope by calling the historic Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the first session opening on 11 October 1962, which is now his feast.

The metayage system is the cultivation of land for a proprietor by one who receives a proportion of the produce, as a kind of sharecropping. Another class of land tenancy in France is named fermage [fr], whereby the rent is paid annually in banknotes. A farm operating under métayage was known as a métairie, the origin of some place names in areas where the system was used, such as Metairie, Louisiana.

The metayage system is the cultivation of land for a proprietor by one who receives a proportion of the produce, as a kind of sharecropping. Another class of land tenancy in France is named fermage (fr), whereby the rent is paid annually in banknotes. A farm operating under métayage was known as a métairie, the origin of some place names in areas where the system was used, such as Metairie, Louisiana.

A masoveria contract is a Catalan institution dating back to the tenth century and still in wide practice. It is a form of sharecropping by which the owner of a rural farm commissions a natural person (masover, or tenant farmer) to work in the farm in exchange for a percentage of the results of the crop or farm production. It usually involves also the right to live on the estate, often in a property different from the main building, properly known as masoveria.

Within the masoveria concept there are contracts that do not involve farming but refer to other services related with the running or the maintenance of a property, such as gardener, cook, driver, etc.