What happened to the loggers of America's past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did these communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest provides a new perspective on the process of ......
Louis Bromfield, Friends of the Land, and the Rise of Sustainable Agriculture
How Malabar Farm pioneered soil conservation and grew the sustainable agriculture movement Established in 1939 by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and farmer Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm was once considered "the most famous farm in the world." Farmers, conservationists, politicians, businessmen, and even a few Hollywood celebrities-including ......
How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California
As Southern California recovered from the collapse of the cattle industry in the 1860s, the arrival of railroads-attacked by newspapers as the greedy "octopus"-and the expansion of citrus agriculture transformed the struggling region into a vast, idealized, and prosperous garden. New groves of the latest citrus varieties and new towns like ......
In Draining New Orleans, the first full-length book devoted to "the world's toughest drainage problem," renowned geographer Richard Campanella recounts the epic challenges and ingenious efforts to dewater the Crescent City. With forays into geography, public health, engineering, architecture, politics, sociology, race relations, and disaster ......
Indiana County Extension Agents During the Great Depression and World War II
The Great Depression of the 1930s nearly brought the agricultural community to a standstill. As markets went into an economic freefall, farmers who had suffered through a post-World War I economic depression in the 1920s would now struggle to produce crops, livestock, and other commodities that could return more than the cost to produce them. In ......
Work, Ecology, and Range Cattle Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West
The image of western ranchers making a stand for their "rights"-against developers, the government, "illegal" immigrants-may be commonplace today, but the political power of the cowboy was a long time in the making. In a book steeped in the culture, traditions, and history of western range ranching, Michelle K. Berry takes readers into the Cold ......
Work, Ecology, and Range Cattle Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West
The image of western ranchers making a stand for their "rights"-against developers, the government, "illegal" immigrants-may be commonplace today, but the political power of the cowboy was a long time in the making. In a book steeped in the culture, traditions, and history of western range ranching, Michelle K. Berry takes readers into the Cold ......
Shantyboat dwellers and steamboat roustabouts formed an organic part of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi River bottoms during the rise of industrial America and the twilight of steamboat packets from 1875 to 1930. Nevertheless, both groups remain understudied by scholars of the era. Most of what we know about these laborers on the river ......
Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s
Tucked into the files of Iowa State University's Cooperative Extension Service is a small, innocuous looking pamphlet with the title Lenders: Working through the Farmer-Lender Crisis. Cooperative Extension Service intended this publication to improve bankers' empathy and communication skills, especially when facing farmers showing "Suicide Warning ......
