Author: James H. ShidelerPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Farm crisis, 1919-1923
Author: James H. ShidelerThe Farm Crisis, 1919-1923
Author: James H. ShidelerPublisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520350537
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1957.
The Politics of Despair
Author: Tracy CampbellPublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813149029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
Shortly after 1900, tens of thousands of tobacco growers throughout Kentucky and Tennessee convulsed the region for nearly a decade in a revolt against the monopolistic practices of the American Tobacco Company. Though the revolt known as the Tobacco Wars remains one of the more remarkable insurgencies of rural America, it is also one of the more misunderstood. In this first major account of the uprising in over half a century, Tracy Campbell tells the story of these embattled farmers and casts a provocative new light on the issues that fueled the Tobacco Wars. When tobacco prices fell below the cost of production in the early 1900s, farmers in western Kentucky and Tennessee, faced with desperate economic circumstances, formed cooperatives through which they could pool their crops and withhold tobacco from the market until a satisfactory price was offered. Campbell recounts the organizational underpinnings of the notorious "Black Patch War" and the forces that drove farmers to seek violent solutions to their economic ills. Campbell then expands the story to the burley region, where a simultaneous movement was under way. In 1908, over thirty thousand burley growers undertook the only successful large-scale agricultural strike in American history. Campbell brings this drama to life and describes the emotional day when the farmers achieved their unprecedented victory over the powerful Tobacco Trust. The Tobacco Wars represented one of the last desperate gasps from the countryside before the onset of "agribusiness" drove millions of farmers and their families away for good. The Politics of Despair thus stands as a unique reminder of a tradition of protest that has, perhaps, been irretrievably lost. This book will interest not only rural and labor historians and students of the American South but anyone concerned with the profound issues surrounding the decline of rural America.
American Communism and Soviet Russia
Author: Theodore DraperPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351532839
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 526
Book Description
This companion volume to The Roots of American Communism brings to completion what the author describes as the essence of the relationship of American Communism to Soviet Russia in the fi rst decade after the Bolsheviks seized power. The outpouring of new archive materials makes it plain that Draper's premise is direct and to the point: The communist movement "was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power." Each generation must fi nd this out for itself, and no better guide exists than the work of master historian Theodore Draper. American Communism and Soviet Russia is acknowledged to be the classic, authoritative history of the critical formative period of the American Communist Party. Based on confi dential minutes of the top party committees, interviews with party leaders, and public records, this book carefully documents the infl uence of the Soviet Union on the fundamental nature of American Communism. Draper's refl ections on that period in this edition are a fi tting capstone to this pioneering effort. Daniel Bell, in Saturday Review, remarked about this work that "there are surprisingly few scholarly histories of individual Communist parties and even fewer which treat of this crucial decade in intimate detail. Draper's account is therefore of great importance." Arthur M. Schlesinger, in The New York Times Book Review, says that "in reading Draper's closely packed pages, one hardly knows whether to marvel more at the detachment with which he examines the Communist movement, the patience with which he unravels the dreary and intricate struggles for power among the top leaders, or the intelligence with which he analyzes the interplay of factors determining the development of American Communism." And Michael Harrington, in Commonweal, asserted that Draper's book "will long be a defi nitive source volume and analysis of the Stalinization of American Communism."
Sweet Tyranny
Author: Kathleen MapesPublisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252091809
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339
Book Description
In this innovative grassroots to global study, Kathleen Mapes explores how the sugar beet industry transformed the rural Midwest by introducing large factories, contract farming, and foreign migrant labor. Identifying rural areas as centers for modern American industrialism, Mapes contributes to an ongoing reorientation of labor history from urban factory workers to rural migrant workers. She engages with a full range of individuals, including Midwestern family farmers, industrialists, Eastern European and Mexican immigrants, child laborers, rural reformers, Washington politicos, and colonial interests. Engagingly written, Sweet Tyranny demonstrates that capitalism was not solely a force from above but was influenced by the people below who defended their interests in an ever-expanding imperialist market.
Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age: From the End of World War I to the Great Crash
Author: James CimentPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317471652
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 665
Book Description
This illustrated encyclopedia offers in-depth coverage of one of the most fascinating and widely studied periods in American history. Extending from the end of World War I in 1918 to the great Wall Street crash in 1929, the Jazz age was a time of frenetic energy and unprecedented historical developments, ranging from the League of Nations, woman suffrage, Prohibition, the Red Scare, the Ku Klux Klan, the Lindberg flight, and the Scopes trial, to the rise of organized crime, motion pictures, and celebrity culture."Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age" provides information on the politics, economics, society, and culture of the era in rich detail. The entries cover themes, personalities, institutions, ideas, events, trends, and more; and special features such as sidebars and photos help bring the era vividly to life.
Cotton Fields No More
Author: Gilbert C. FitePublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813150485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
No general history of southern farming since the end of slavery has been published until now. For the first time, Gilbert C. Fite has drawn together the many threads that make up commercial agricultural development in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, to explain why agricultural change was so slow in the South, and then to show how the agents of change worked after 1933 to destroy the old and produce a new agriculture. Fite traces the decline and departure of King Cotton as the hard taskmaster of the region, and the replacement of cotton by a somewhat more democratically rewarding group of farm products: poultry, cattle, swine; soybeans; citrus and other fruits; vegetables; rice; dairy products; and forest products. He shows how such crop changes were related to other developments, such as the rise of a capital base in the South, mainly after World War II; technological innovation in farming equipment; and urbanization and regional population shifts. Based largely upon primary sources, Cotton Fields No More will become the standard work on post-Civil War agriculture in the South. It will be welcomed by students of the American South and of United States agriculture, economic, and social history.
The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945
Author: George Brown TindallPublisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807100202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 844
Book Description
The history of the South in this century has been obscured in the ever-growing mass of information about the region's rapid change and turbulent development. In this book, Volume X of A History of the South, the historical image of the modern South is brought into full focus for the first time.George Brown Tindall presents a thorough and well-balanced historical narrative of the region during the years 1913--1945 when the South underwent a transformation from a predominantly agricultural area to one of growing industrialization.The inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson ended a half century of political isolation for the South and ushered in an era of agrarian reforms, prohibition, woman suffrage, industrial growth, and recurring crises for Southern farmers. During the 1920's the South was caught in a contrast of urban booms and farm distress. There were flareups of racial violence, and the Ku Klux Klan was revived. Mr. Tindall devotes considerable attention to the Southern literary renaissance which produced William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and many other notable writers and critics.The Emergence of the New South provides a new understanding of the changing political and social climate in the South under the stresses of depression, the New Deal, the labor movement, Negro unrest, and two world wars.
William I. Myers and the Modernization of American Agriculture
Author: Douglas SlaybaughPublisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557532794
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
During the farm credit crisis brought on by the Great Depression, Myers served in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal government, writing the legislation to consolidate federal farm credit programs. After a brief stint as deputy governor, he became governor of the Farm Credit Administration in 1933. Myers led the agency to two great successes: saving thousands of farms from bankruptcy and establishing a permanent, government-sponsored credit system for farmers comparable to what private banks provided industry. Myers returned to Cornell in 1938 and served for nearly fifteen years as dean of the College of Agriculture. Myers also served on the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was instituting agricultural research programs that would enable developing nations to become more productive, self-reliant, and anticommunist members of the global community.
The Farmer's Benevolent Trust
Author: Victoria Saker WoestePublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080786711X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Book Description
Americans have always regarded farming as a special calling, one imbued with the Jeffersonian values of individualism and self- sufficiency. As Victoria Saker Woeste demonstrates, farming's cultural image continued to shape Americans' expectations of rural society long after industrialization radically transformed the business of agriculture. Even as farmers enthusiastically embraced cooperative marketing to create unprecedented industry- wide monopolies and control prices, they claimed they were simply preserving their traditional place in society. In fact, the new legal form of cooperation far outpaced judicial and legislative developments at both the state and federal levels, resulting in a legal and political struggle to redefine the place of agriculture in the industrial market. Woeste shows that farmers were adept at both borrowing such legal forms as the corporate trust for their own purposes and obtaining legislative recognition of the new cooperative style. In the process, however, the first rule of capitalism--every person for him- or herself--trumped the traditional principle of cooperation. After 1922, state and federal law wholly endorsed cooperation's new form. Indeed, says Woeste, because of its corporate roots, this model of cooperation fit so neatly with the regulatory paradigms of the first half of the twentieth century that it became an essential policy of the modern administrative state.