The nearly all-white neighborhood of Davis's childhood was populated by refugees of the Great Depression, mostly Southern Baptist families from Oklahoma and Texas, and had a country-western ballroom and rodeo.

His father Dwight worked in the wholesale meat industry for the Superior Meat Company in downtown San Diego and was a member of the meat cutter's union, and his uncle ran a wholesale meat company. Returning in 1953, Davis was raised in a tract home in the community of Bostonia in San Diego County.

Both parents hitchhiked to California during the Great Depression and came to the El Cajon Valley, but moved to Fontana for a brief period during the Second World War and after. Mary was an Irish Catholic from Columbus, Ohio, and the daughter of Jack Ryan, a veteran of the Spanish–American War. He was a trade-union Democrat and an ' anti-racist,' which Davis attributed to his ancestors, Welsh abolitionists and Union soldiers who had settled in the Black Swamp of Ohio. Dwight was from Venedocia, Ohio, and was of Welsh and Protestant background. (source: Nielsen Book Data) Publisher's summaryĮxamining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history and to sow the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the third world.Michael Ryan Davis was born in Fontana, California, on March 10, 1946, to Dwight and Mary (Ryan) Davis. The author, Mike Davis, argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as 'The Third World' were sown in this era of high imperialism, as the price for Capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives. The effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. All of these countries were effected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated the populations. 'Late Victorian Holocausts' focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China and North-Eastern Brazil. Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p.

Victorian holocausts