American History
John Harrison Skinner was a mainstay at Purdue University for more than thirty years. From the student to the professor, from the head to the Dean, he saw the inside workings of Purdue agriculture like no others of his time. He was a student, professor, administrator, and loyal supporter of everything agricultural-related at Purdue University. In ways, he was a very focused, single-minded man who understood from his own background growing up that growers needed help more than ever. He decided that agriculture needed more faculty to find answers to the questions asked by growers, and that the School of Agriculture deserved more faculty, buildings, lands and money. He started with one building and 150 acres when he was dean and soon turned a bare campus into ten buildings and a thousand acres. The livestock on the farms increased four fold, and he showed his knowledge of livestock breeding by winning many times at the International Livestock Exposition. Agriculture was in his mind the number one industry, and that Indiana should do everything in its power to address their needs both in college, on the farm, and in industry. What he left behind was a agricultural program that today still remains largely intact as he built it. But in the end his most impressive and enduring legacy is that what’s good for growers of Indiana is also good for the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
This study focuses on the transformation of the U.S. agricultural economy in the middle of the nineteenth center and its impact on farm famalies. In the first detailed case study of th etransition of subsistence to commercial agriculture, te author examines call formation, migration, and household structure in the context of emerging agricultural markets and the growing availability of cheap consumer goods.
R. Douglas Hurt's brief history of American agriculture, from the prehistoric period through the twentieth century, is written for anyone coming to this subject for the first time. It also provides a ready reference to the economic, social, political, scientific, and technological changes that have most affected farming in America. American Agriculture is a story of considerable achievement and success, but it is also a story of greed, racism, and violence. Hurt offers a provocative look at a history that has been shaped by the best and worst of human nature. Here is the background essential for understanding the complexity of American agricultural history, from the transition to commercial agriculture during the colonial period to the failure of government policy following World War II. Hurt includes the contributions of African Americans, Native Americans, and women. This revised edition closes with an examination of the troubled landscape at the turn of the twenty-first century. This survey will serve as a text for courses in the history of American agriculture and rural studies as well as a supplementary text for economic history and rural sociology courses. It is illustrated with maps, drawings, and over seventy splendid photographs.
Indiana's pioneers came to southern Indiana to turn the dream of an America based on family farming into a reality. The golden age prior to the Civil War led to a post-War preserving of the independent family farmer. Salstrom examines this "independence" and finds the label to be less than adequate. Hoosier farming was an inter-dependent activity leading to a society of borrowing and loaning. When people talk about supporting family farming, as Salstrom notes, the issue is a societal one with a greater population involved than just the farmers themselves.
The Ku Klux Klan reached its height in the 1920s, and nowhere was it as large and politically powerful as in Indiana, where about 30 percent of the native-born white male population were Klansmen. This book explores the career of D. C. Stephenson, grand dragon of the Indiana Klan, his rise to power, and his eventual conviction for second-degree murder in 1925. Grand Dragon traces Stephenson's background, still shrouded in mystery due to Stephenson's own colorful but imaginary accounts of his early years. A political opportunist, Stephenson's rise to power in the loan was startlingly swift, but so was his fall from grace. Tried in Klan country for the rape and murder of a young government worker, Stephenson was convicted and imprisoned for a crime of which some still consider him innocent.
Author of six earlier books about United States railroads, John F. Stover packs this narrative history with careful scholarship and colorful description which will appeal to the railroad buff and the professional historian, as well as to any reader who wishes to travel with the "Mother of Railroads" through an exciting period in United States history.
Based on extensive interviews and archival research, this book traces the career of Orville Redenbacher, the “popcorn king,” from his agricultural studies at Purdue University to his emergence as an American advertising icon. Born in Brazil, Indiana, in 1907, Orville began his lifelong obsession with the development of new strains of seed at Purdue where he earned a degree in agronomy while also playing in the All-American Marching Band. After experimenting with thousands of varieties, Orville and his business partner Charlie Bowman launched Orville Redenbacher’s gourmet popping corn in 1970. Through a combination of shrewd marketing and a notably superior product, the partners controlled a third of the market for popping corn by 1976, when their “Chester Hybrids” business was sold to Hunt Wesson Foods. Orville Redenbacher continued to prosper as a larger-than-life brand spokesperson and a symbol of wholesomeness and fun until his death in 1995. Based on interviews conducted in the last few years of Orville’s life, this book paints a fascinating picture of a deeply serious agricultural pioneer and marketing genius, whose image can still be found in almost every North American home.
Here more about this book in an interview broadcast on WBAA, Indiana's oldest radio station, on July 14, 2011.
Knights of the Quill offers a unique assessment of war correspondence in Southern newspapers during the American Civil War. The men and women who covered the battles and political developments for Southern newspapers were of a different breed than those who reported the war for the North. They were doctors, lawyers, teachers, editors, and businessmen, nearly all of them with college and professional degrees. Sleeping on beds of snow, dining on raw corn and burned bread, they exhibited a dedication that laid the groundwork for news gathering in the twenty-first century. Objectivity and accuracy became important news values, as shows that Southern war correspondence easily equaled in quality the work produced by reporters for Northern newspapers. With its emphasis on primary sources, the book offers an important and enduring historical perspective on the Civil War and also meets the highest standards of historical scholarship.
The Political Pulpit Revisited examines a set of arguments originally made in 1975 about church-state relations in the U.S. Scholars have long wondered how a nation of some two thousand different religious denominations has been able to remain relatively calm about such matters. Controversial issues like abortion rights, war-time pacifism, sanctuary for illegal aliens, clerical abuse of children, non-taxation of church property, and other matters continually roil the political waters. The first edition describes how church and state tensions are worked out symbolically rather than coercively, legally, or economically. The Political Pulpit Revisited updates church/state arguments and then offers reflections by eight distinguished scholars who re-examine the relationship in light of recent events. The result is a fresh look at the American experiment in those relations and what it portends for the U.S. in the years ahead.
In this book, the author gives an edited version of the actual events of two nineteenth century pioneers, Overton Johnson and William H. Winter, exploring westward expansion. The book provides a colorful tale of the men's journey, as well as the two years spent in the West. The book also demonstrates the diversity among territories by describing Indian, American, English, and California settlements
Anselm Verener Lee Guise was a young British mining engineer ap pointed to the post of assistant manager of a tin mine in the first d cades of the twentieth century in Bolivia. Six Years in Bolivia: The Adventures of a Mining Engineer (1922) was the result of his experiences and contact with the Bolivian landscape and people. His travel book underlines Guise's concerns with cultural, economic, and gender differences while presenting a personal transformation forced by his adaptation to new ways of life, which compelled him to perform activities far beyond his knowledge.
From yesterday’s gingham girls to today’s Google-era Farmer Janes, The Midwest Farmer’s Daughter explores the resurgent role played by female agriculturalists at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the US are woman-owned, but when, paradoxically, America’s farm-reared daughters are conspicuously absent from popular film, television, and literature. In this first-of-its-kind treatment, Zachary Michael Jack follows the fascinating story of the girl who became a regional and national legend: from Donna Reed to Laura Ingalls Wilder, from Elly May Clampett to The Dukes of Hazzard’s Catherine Bach, from Lawrence Welk’s TV sweethearts to the tragic heroines of Jane Smiley’s Thousand Acres. From Amish farm women bloggers, to Missouri homesteaders and seed-savers, to rural Nebraskan graphic novelists and, ultimately, to the seven generations of entrepreneurial Iowan farm women who have animated his own family since before the Civil War, Jack shines new documentary light on the symbol of American virtue, energy, and ingenuity that rural writer Martha Foote Crow once described as the “great rural reserve of initiating force, sane judgment and spiritual drive.”
Packed with dozens of interviews, The Midwest Farmer’s Daughter covers the history and the renaissance of agrarian women on both sides of the fence. Giving equal consideration to both agriculture’s time-tested rural and small-town Farm Bureaus, 4-H, and FFA training grounds as well as to the eco-innovations generated by the region’s rising woman-powered “agro-polises” such as Chicago, the author crafts a lively, easy-to-read cultural and social history, exploring the pioneering role today’s female agriculturalists play in the emergence of farmers’ markets, urban farms, community-supported agriculture, and the new “back-to-the-land” and “do-it-yourself” movements. For all those whose lives have been graced by the enduring strength of American farm women, The Midwest Farmer’s Daughter offers a groundbreaking examination of a dynamic American icon.
Examines the economic development of the United States from colonial times through the mid-Twentieth Century and uses elementary economic analysis as a tool for illuminating historical events and their economic origins and consequences. It will consider how the economy has grown over time as well as how and why the structure of the American economy has changed over time. Throughout American economic history various public and private policies have at times been successful and at other times failed. Accordingly the prevailing theme of economic history can be expressed as the idea that any particular policy is not destined to succeed or fail but rather that there are always viable choices. Indeed, economic history is a record of those choices and their effects. The aim of this course is not to provide you with conventional and one-dimensional interpretations but rather to offer you alternative economic views of historical events. Ideally this course will help you understand and apply economic analysis to historical events as well as to ascertain probable implications for current and future policies.
Back in print for the first time in over a century, the real heart and soul of the eldest Henry Wallace is revealed in his open letters to America's farm families. These homespun, secular epistles show that Wallace never lost sight of his roots even as he hobnobbed with U.S. Presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, anchored the prestigious Country Life Commission, and edited the most famous agricultural magazine of its day, Wallaces' Farmer. Who better to yoke the sacred, agrarian arts of stewardship, husbandry, and parenting than writer-philosopher-farmer-conservationist-minister-educator-public benefactor extraordinaire Uncle Henry Wallace, the man who planted the seeds of honorable public service in his own world-famous son and grandson, Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace and Vice President and Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace, respectively.