Douglas Hurt Research Articles

The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences by R. Douglas Hurt (review).

The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences by R. Douglas Hurt (review).

The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences by R. Douglas Hurt

Reviewed by: The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences by R. Douglas Hurt Jonathan E. Robins The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences. By r. douglas hurt. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020. 280 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2051-5. $49.95 (hardcover). R. Douglas Hurt's The Green Revolution in the Global South is an ambitious attempt to evaluate long-running controversies over the planning, deployment, and impacts of Green Revolution technologies in the second half of the twentieth century. Arranged geographically, with chapters on Latin America (mostly Mexico), South Asia (mostly India), East and Southeast Asia, China, and sub-Saharan Africa, the book follows the Green Revolution from the 1950s into the 2000s. A final chapter on the "gene revolution" rounds out the study. Hurt describes the book as "a highly selective effort to synthesize the literature and trace the acceptance or rejection of the Green Revolution over time" (p. 4). Each chapter pits agricultural scientists, who delivered high-yielding varieties and related technical inputs to food-deficit states, against their critics. The latter are described as no more than that, occasionally with adjectives like "social scientist" or "Marxian" attached. The book defines success in terms set by agricultural scientists: did total food production increase or not? Readers will find a complicated, and at times confusing, picture. The Green Revolution was a success in Mexico, but by the mid-1970s it was a failure (p. 27). In China, famine was "no longer a possibility" after Green Revolution technologies were implemented, yet "food security . . . had not been achieved" (pp. 111–112). Critics of Green Revolution policies in South Asia allegedly "did not understand the difference between biotechnology, which is scale neutral . . . and the economy of scale associated with mechanization," (p. 65) yet only a few pages earlier we read that biotechnologies were too costly for most farmers (p. 52). This back-and-forth is, in part, an artifact of the linear chronology and attempt at comprehensive coverage found in each chapter. Hurt disavows modernization theory in the introduction, but the analysis that follows reproduces its key claims: that farmers in fooddeficit countries were tradition-bound and backward; that rural markets were underdeveloped or nonexistent; and, particular to the Green Revolution, that technology was scale-neutral, available to anyone willing to learn and work. The book frames social dislocation as an "unexpected outcome" of the Green Revolution, but it was exactly what modernization theorists predicted. High-producing commercial [End Page 725] farms would displace peasants, pushing "unproductive" labor to other sectors. Hurt contends that agricultural scientists "never believed that they had responsibility for creating a more equitable world," as if agriculture existed in a social vacuum (p. 183). In India, for example, Hurt argues that "most critics failed to realize that class and gender historically determined the social and economic problems of the subcontinent and not Green Revolution science" (pp. 51–52). Yet, Green Revolution technologies worked within historic class, caste, and gender contexts, and technologies often intensified inequitable outcomes, including hunger. This was exactly what the critics were writing about. Hurt resorts to "ideology" to explain much of their analysis, even while pointing to the importance of land reform in Green Revolution success stories, and in documenting the negative social and environmental impacts of Green Revolution policies. Each chapter surveys contemporary agricultural and social science publications, and relies heavily on a few recent books. These include excellent titles like Sigrid Schmalzer's Red Revolution, Green Revolution (2016), but also nonspecialist books like Martin Meredith's Fate of Africa (2005). There are fewer references to the growing body of recent articles and dissertations on the Green Revolution and its antecedents. These studies demonstrate that "traditional" agriculture was not timeless, but responded to market pressures, colonialism, and other forces. Focused solely on cereal crops, the book has no room to address cash crops like cotton, which were vitally important in peasant decisions about food crops. And as recent studies—and Hurt—show, peasants often rejected Green Revolution crops for sensible reasons: they were too thirsty for rainfed regions, produced poorly without costly fertilizers, had unacceptable flavors, or were outproduced in...

George Rogers Clark and William Croghan: A Story of the Revolution, Settlement, and Early Life at Locust Grove by Gwynne Tuell Potts

Reviewed by: George Rogers Clark and William Croghan: A Story of the Revolution, Settlement, and Early Life at Locust Grove by Gwynne Tuell Potts R. Douglas Hurt George Rogers Clark and William Croghan: A Story of the Revolution, Settlement, and Early Life at Locust Grove. By Gwynne Tuell Potts. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2020. Pp. viii, 306. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-7867-7.) The name George Rogers Clark often brings to mind Indian-white warfare in the trans-Appalachian West. Although Clark’s military exploits in Kentucky, the Ohio River Valley, and the Illinois Country in behalf of Virginia and the national government from the American Revolution through the War of 1812 are familiar to anyone knowledgeable about this period, his later years are less well known. Even fewer people know much about William Croghan, the Irishborn veteran of the Virginia Line of the Continental army and western businessperson. It is in these respects regarding Clark and Croghan that this new book by Gwynne Tuell Potts, former executive director and president of Historic Locust Grove, contributes to historical knowledge. Clark met Croghan during the Revolution, and they became friends for life. After the war, Clark, as principal surveyor, hired Croghan to help lay out Virginia’s military bounty lands, and Croghan stood by Clark in his efforts to secure lands in Kentucky and the Illinois Country by both peace and warfare. After the American Revolution, Virginia wanted a leader who could suppress Native American resistance and ensure its land claims west of the Appalachians. Clark had a reputation for military skill and ruthlessness. Potts goes beyond this well-told story by pursuing Clark after his military years when his grievances festered because Virginia and the federal government declined to pay for his military expenses, at least until near the end of his life. To do so, Potts follows Clark’s efforts to raise a western army to help France overthrow the Spanish regime at New Orleans and establish a colony of Virginians on the west bank of the Mississippi River. Along the way, she notes the intrigues of James Wilkinson and Aaron Burr in the West. Potts also traces the life of William Croghan who, in 1790, purchased 387 acres near Louisville and built a house known as Locust Grove. Croghan’s residence soon became a place of visitation for many western leaders, such as William Clark (George Rogers Clark’s brother), Meriwether Lewis, and Andrew Jackson, among others. William Croghan married the Clarks’ sister, Lucy, thereby strengthening the interfamily relationship. In 1818, George Rogers Clark, ill, penniless, and embittered, died at Locust Grove under the care of his prosperous friend. Potts acknowledges the often dysfunctional relationships of the Croghan family and the sales of Locust Grove to various nonfamily buyers. In 1961, Jefferson County and the commonwealth of Kentucky purchased Locust Grove and its remaining fifty-five acres. Locust Grove became a National Historic Landmark by virtue of the many well-known people who passed through its doors. Louisville metro government now owns it. Overall, Potts provides a succinct survey of the interconnected lives of George Rogers Clark and William Croghan. Her portrayal of Clark’s life after the War of 1812 is a story of heartbreak and decline, and his relationship with Croghan is a testament to friendship and loyalty during good and bad times. Both men lived “socially traditional” lives for the age regarding slavery, Native [End Page 119] Americans, and national expansion (p. 2). The latter part of the book provides ample genealogical information that can be tedious to follow. Potts bases her work on primary research to consider Clark’s later years when his military exploits largely had been forgotten, but when his friendship with Croghan remained unwavering. In the end, Clark contributed to securing Kentucky and the Illinois Country for the United States, while William Croghan’s Locust Grove became a physical legacy to a little-known period in American history. R. Douglas Hurt Purdue University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

River, Reaper, Rail: Agriculture and Identity in Ohio's Mad River Valley, 1795–1885 by Timothy H. H. Thoresen

Reviewed by: River, Reaper, Rail: Agriculture and Identity in Ohio's Mad River Valley, 1795–1885 by Timothy H. H. Thoresen Ginette Aley (bio) Keywords Ohio, Old Northwest, agriculture, farming, railroads, markets River, Reaper, Rail: Agriculture and Identity in Ohio's Mad River Valley, 1795–1885. By Timothy H. H. Thoresen. (Akron, OH: The University of Akron Press, 2018. Pp. 279. Paper, $59.95.) As late as 1860, the eve of the Civil War, Ohioans' collective identity was wrapped up in agriculture. As historian Timothy H. H. Thoresen observes, "Land to own and to farm, that was the desire" (114). Indeed, this sentiment pervaded the nineteenth-century Midwest. Although his study, River, Reaper, Rail: Agriculture and Identity in Ohio's Mad River Valley, 1795–1885, is firmly rooted in Champaign County, Ohio, its tracing of farmers' early market orientation, including adaptations of traditional farming practices to changing circumstances and technology, and development of state-sponsored farmer organizations tells a much broader story of agrarianism across the North and, specifically, emerging Midwest. Making liberal use of land, tax, and county records as well as census data, land policy, annual state agriculture reports, and newspapers, Thoresen deftly re-creates the world of nineteenth-century farming in Ohio, from the primitive pioneering phase to a post-Civil War era dominated by railroads. While his heavy reliance on local newspapers casts an impressionistic view on his interpretation, it nevertheless offers up some of the prominent male voices, concerns, and ideas in these farm communities. As others have done, Thoresen characterizes farmers as fundamentally conservative. Yet his study demonstrates at least an interest on their part in change and improvement—so long as the cost did not significantly alter or constrain farm operations. As shown here, farmers historically have also been innovators. [End Page 176] In 1805, two years after Ohio's statehood, Champaign County was established in the Mad River Valley in the west-central part of the state; however, settler-farmers had been pushing into the area from the east and by way of the Ohio River since the 1790s, especially after the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. New arrivals, who settled mainly along the waterways as well as the Virginia Military District, faced a physically arduous process in clearing the forested land, which typically required 3 to 5 years until farms were self-sustaining. The landscape became dotted with unfenced cattle and pigs; small grain cultivation; draft animals, especially oxen; and plowing at the rate of about an acre per day. Migrants came in several waves including after the War of 1812 and then again in the 1820s and 1830s, each time indicating land-purchase patterns that reflected changing land policies. In ways that call to mind the insightful work of noted agricultural and rural historian R. Douglas Hurt, Thoresen pays close attention to the farming practices and market attitudes settler-farmers brought with them and how both evolved with the new farming environment, transportation connections, and expanding market economy. Two key adaptations that advanced American agriculture and productivity were improved plows and the cradle scythe. Extremely marginal transportation and market access, however, loomed as the early nineteenth century's defining problems; solving them, the author points out, "is essentially the history of Champaign County" (11). One need only look at the legislative history concerning local and state-level agriculture societies and infrastructure-building—roads, bridges, canals, and early railroads—to discern growing market interest, locally, statewide, and regionally. Thoresen perceptively surmises that "participation in the market economy was not a conceptual problem; it was a practical problem" (39). Eliminating obstacles opened the door for and, as he characterizes, gave incentive to, farmers to strive for greater productivity, improved breeding of livestock, and higher-yielding seed. Clearly, though, the impact of the railroad on Champaign County, Ohio, farmers and American agriculture more broadly, even in its infancy in the 1850s, cannot be overstated. The prospects of commercial agriculture transformed ideas about farming. More market connections, reduction of transit time and freight charges not only made increased productivity logical but also led to a related rise in storage and processing enterprises such as grain-storage warehouses, grain cars, and so on. Greater productivity came...

In Search of a Dust Bowl Narrative for the Twenty-First Century

In Search of a Dust Bowl Narrative for the Twenty-First Century Frank Uekötter (bio) Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism. By Hannah Holleman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. xvii + 231 pp. Notes, index. $35.00, cloth. Legacies of Dust: Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains. By Douglas Sheflin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. xiv + 406 pp. Map, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00, cloth. Documents of the Dust Bowl. Edited by R. Douglas Hurt. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2019. xxvii + 240 pp. Bibliography, index. $94.00, cloth. For everyone studying the Dust Bowl, the first order of business should be to realize how odd it is that we keep returning to this topic. With so many issues waiting to be explored at the intersection of agricultural and environmental history, scholars should have a good reason to look at one and the same event again and again. Do they have one? Elbow room is tight in the field, and every new book needs to squeeze in. The competition includes a book that won a Bancroft Prize (Donald Worster's Dust Bowl in 1980) and the winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction (Timothy Egan for The Worst Hard Time). Scholars also need to cope with the combined cultural thrust of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Dorothea Lange's photographs, and the music of Woody Guthrie. Is this a case akin to the wall full of graffiti that magically attracts artists (and those who see themselves as such) for yet another layer of paint? Or should we think in terms of the broken records of the shellac days that kept skipping back? The latter metaphor might lose readers below age fifty, though. Of course, the Dust Bowl had dramatic pictures. It is safe to assume that the plight of the Southern Plains would have received different coverage, if any, in the absence of spectacular photographs. The Dust Bowl offered the perfect images for the United States of the Depression years: in the words of David Danbom, Caucasians could watch "someone white with whom they could identify and who was worse off than they were."1 Dramatic photographs no longer stand out in an age awash with visuals, but something else has emerged that draws [End Page 161] writers to the issue. The Dust Bowl has shown itself to be a powerful and remarkably versatile template. If you have a cause that needs a little boost, just link it to the Dust Bowl. Needless to say, there is nothing illegitimate on principle about writing history in light of the concerns of one's time. In fact, some people say that this is why we engage with history. Residents of the Great Plains might object that templates are often imported from some- where else and have shallow roots in the land; narratives of the Dust Bowl are also about the cultural occupation of a peripheral region. It may provide a quantum of solace that marginalization is a common experience in rural areas worldwide. In industrialized societies, farmers are hopelessly outnumbered and cannot compete with the monetary and cultural capital that resides in the big cities. In any case, the present reviewer is not in a position to speak for the region. He has never lived in the Great Plains—a month at Iowa State University was the closest approximation—and if you write about the Dust Bowl in the urban wilderness of the English Midlands, it takes a particularly strenuous intellectual effort to understand that a few days without rain might be a problem. However, there is also an intellectual argument for a word of caution. Invoking the drama and the extent of human misery can turn into a surrogate for theoretical and empirical sophistication. Disputing an argument based on the Dust Bowl feels like leaving people dying in the dirt: no matter whether you have a reason, everyone will talk about your heart of stone. It is the environmentalist equivalent of the argumentum ad Hitlerem. Nobody will challenge you if you have the Dust Bowl on your side. We can see the approach at...

Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson

Reviewed by: Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson Tim Roberts Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson, eds., Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2013. 196 pp. $39.50. One challenge instructors of Civil War history face is to complicate students’ assumptions that the war pitted “The North” against “The South.” Important books have appeared emphasizing the significance of regional differences in the Civil War South.1 Likewise, scholars have sought to rekindle interest, first emphasized by Frederick Jackson Turner, in American regional history.2 But until the appearance of the book under review and a few recent monographs, little Civil War scholarship has focused on what people called “the Northwestern United States,” meaning the antislavery states west of Pennsylvania (2).3 [End Page 173] Union Heartland begins to rectify the situation by presenting seven essays that seek to identify what may have been unique about the Civil War’s impact on the most agricultural part of the Union. An important essay by R. Douglas Hurt provides detailed evidence about the extent and variety of the war’s boon to midwestern agriculture. Military demands for horses, hogs, and grains encouraged farmers (male and female) to expand land development and invest in laborsaving technology; the Civil War spurred northern industrialization by first expanding farming output. Another valuable essay is Brett Barker’s study of local Republican efforts to squelch Democratic war dissent through boycotts and acts of violence against antiwar newspapers. Barker’s point is that while official actions by the Lincoln administration to suspend northerners’ civil liberties may have been measured, as previously argued by Mark E. Neely, unofficial or vigilante censorship of the Democratic press was perhaps widespread and warrants further study.4 Three of the book’s essays show a variety of midwestern women’s wartime experiences. Ginette Aley emphasizes women’s sense of alienation over the departure and uncertain fate of husbands and fathers. She notes that while gender norms of the day generally “defined a woman’s life almost entirely” in terms of her family, women in remote areas of the North were particularly affected (126). Nicole Etcheson and J. L. Anderson then show different outcomes of midwestern women’s sudden solitary circumstances. Etcheson studies how soldiers’ wives who moved in with or near their husbands’ in-laws effectively remained subordinated to their husbands as a result. Anderson, meanwhile, emphasizes women’s new expressions of autonomy in managing farms and family because of “the vacant chair” (148). The book’s other two essays reflect how not all midwesterners were consumed by the war’s sacrifices of family or civil liberties, or even economic windfalls. Michael P. Gray describes the circus-like atmosphere of civilians’ enthrallment with Confederate officers imprisoned on Johnson’s Island near Sandusky, Ohio. Julie A. Mujic, on the other hand, studies University of Michigan students’ class essays, debates, and newspapers to explain how the (male) students rationalized their failure to join the Union military. For these students, “staying in school became the equivalent of fighting the rebels,” and their classes, they asserted, prepared them to lead the country in the anticipated murky postwar era (58). Mujic’s essay could benefit from an epilogue to trace whether any of the students she studied actually played public roles during Reconstruction, but her work shows another layer of [End Page 174] midwesterners’ reactions to war, in addition to the other “battles” elucidated elsewhere in this diverse and welcome collection. Tim Roberts Western Illinois University Macomb, Illinois notes 1. William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Daniel Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2014). 2. Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). As Aley notes, however, this book omitted the Midwest as a significant American region. 3. Jennifer Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the...

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt (review)

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt (review)

Plowed Earth Policies

Plowed Earth Policies Steven Stoll (bio) Adam Wesley Dean. An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 240pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. R. Douglas Hurt. Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 364pp. Tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. At the end of the Civil War, Winslow Homer painted a man swinging a scythe in a wheat field. The man has set aside his Union coat and canteen and puts his back into the work. The grain and a blue sky radiate around him like a halo. We cannot see his face, a view that renders him no particular veteran in a new field but every veteran. He is the people as a whole, the strength and optimism of a unified Union. The scythe symbolizes the death he escaped and the life he is making on the Prairie or the Great Plains. The Veteran in a New Field is more than an expression of armistice. It speaks to a vision of politics and society that preceded the war, a conception of the rural household as the fundamental unit of the Republic. The language of agrarian possession saturated political speech in the North. The outcome of the war depended as much on the price of corn in the South as it did on Lee’s strategies and the number of casualties. In two recent books, Adam Wesley Dean and R. Douglas Hurt explore different aspects of the agrarian history of the Civil War era. There is a longstanding relationship between farmers and war. The citizen-soldier was often a husbandman. Think of ancient Greece’s hoplites and the minutemen of Concord. Both stilled their plows and fell into formation under officers who also conceived of themselves as plain practical yeomen. In the mythology of nationalism, the farmer embodies blood and soil. Governments and monarchs come and go, but nations continually emerge from an agrarian fusion of The People and The Land. Lal Pahadur, Prime Minister of India, declared in 1965: “Hail the soldier. Hail the farmer.”1 Pakistan had just attacked India, and the country needed food and fighters. But note the implicit contradiction. Farmers charging in battlefields are not laboring in wheat fields. In societies that depend primarily on agriculture in the household mode of [End Page 104] production, the same people fulfill both roles. The tension between ideology and materialism opens rich ground for interpretation. Dean’s An Agrarian Republic is a tour through the Republican notion that smallholders formed the stronghold of the Union, that they distinguished the free North from the enslaved South. In Dean’s telling, the party conceived of itself as representing the interests of farmers, putting them forth as the rightful occupants of the Great Plains and California. The free-soil arguments of the 1850s make no sense without farmers as the instruments of political ideology, and even the establishment of Yosemite National Park owes something to the same sense of land well managed. One recurrent subject in the book is the division of land and its distribution by government in order to accomplish social ends. Dean does great work by excavating the tangled arguments for and against the Homestead Act, first passed by Congress in 1860 and vetoed by President James Buchanan. Whigs sought to deploy white smallholders across the public domain for a variety of reasons. Quarter-section wheat farms would increase food and population, block the expansion of plantations, and establish the region as the dominion of whites. Southerners saw the bill as a political land grab. In his veto, Bu-chanan claimed that it would drain Tennessee and Kentucky of its agrarians, and he believed that settlement in the West would “demoralize the people” (p. 96). The bill passed again in 1862, and President Abraham Lincoln signed it. Representative George Washington Julian of Indiana had advocated the law for decades. The Homestead Act wrapped landed possession in racial politics. Every discussion of the future of the public domain had to do with who would be given small pieces...

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South. By R. Douglas Hurt (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2015) 349 pp. $45.00

<i>Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South</i>. By R. Douglas Hurt (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2015) 349 pp. $45.00

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt (review)

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt (review)

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt

Reviewed by: Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt Louis Ferleger Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South. By R. Douglas Hurt. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xiv], 349. Paper, $45.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-2000-8.) R. Douglas Hurt is the author or editor of twenty-one books and far too many book chapters, articles, and reviews to list. His work has covered virtually every conceivable topic that touches directly or indirectly on anything related to American agriculture. His scholarship ranks him as one of the greatest living historians of American agriculture. His latest book, Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South, focuses on southern agriculture during the Civil War, noting that countless students and scholars of the Civil War have neglected, ignored, and downplayed the importance of agricultural production to the war effort. Simply put, Hurt explores how the South entered the war as a powerful agricultural region that imagined its major source of strength—agriculture—would propel it, if not sustain it, during the ensuing conflict. Hurt meticulously examines the pattern of southern agriculture and its impact on southern society. He has scoured the archives and read widely to gather evidence that details the role southern agriculture played during the war years. His analysis of the year-to-year changes in the South’s agricultural sector is a tour de force. Despite tens of millions of words written about almost every aspect of the Civil War, no other historian has analyzed the impact that politics, economics, and power relations had on the South’s greatest weapon: its agricultural sector. Before the Civil War, the South had achieved enormous economic success; but, as Hurt demonstrates, slowly and surely whatever advantages the South had prior to 1861 were eviscerated during the war years. The story Hurt tells is not based on statistics alone. He includes southerners and their voices, showing how they lived and highlighting their fears and concerns. He analyzes the new problems confronting southerners, including hunger, plundered estates, and the significant devastation that pushed many farmers to the edge. In particular, his discussion of the worst harvest season of the war, 1864, sheds new light on how difficult it was for the Confederacy to sustain itself in the waning days of the Civil War. [End Page 681] After reading Hurt’s brilliant analysis, it is hard to imagine how the South could have created conditions sufficient to support the war effort and gain a competitive advantage. While others ignore southern agriculture, Hurt’s evidence suggests that by doing so they miss the critical factors that doomed the Confederacy to eventual defeat. Hurt’s book is a powerful reminder about the importance of agricultural production in the nineteenth century. Far too many works, both on the Civil War and other periods, ignore the role agriculture played in sustaining economic development. After reading this masterful volume, Civil War scholars will need to reconsider and rewrite the history of the Confederacy. To overlook the role that the agricultural sector played during the war is to sadly repeat the tendency to think that agricultural issues are unimportant and inconsequential. As Hurt shows, the success or failure of southern agriculture was as important as the Confederacy’s success or failure on the battlefield. Louis Ferleger Boston University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Introduction

Introduction R. Douglas Hurt (bio) This special issue of New York History emphasizes the agricultural and rural history of New York, with essays ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.1 Not all agricultural history can be considered rural history, and rural history does not necessarily mean agricultural history. This issue is particularly noteworthy because some essays challenge conventional or at least consensus wisdom about the interpretation of agricultural history, while others focus on rural issues that are not agriculturally related. These essays help us better understand the history of New York, and they are suggestive for new ways to consider the agricultural and rural history of the state. Louis Tremante offers a compelling new interpretation of agriculture in the New York City vicinity during the mid-nineteenth century. Tremante challenges the theory of Johann Heinrich von Thünen, whose spatial model of settlement explained the production specializations of farmers in relation to distances from a city center. Instead, Tremante argues that agricultural development near and outward from New York City depended on population growth, land values, immigration, fertilizer supply, and retail markets. Each "driver" changed the agricultural emphasis in the New York City area in different ways from Thünen's use of geography and concentric rings to explain the reasons for agricultural expansion. Jason R. Sellers discusses the ways that Native Americans in the Hudson Valley negotiated European culture to their best advantage by using the Dutch and English settlements as sources of supply—that is, [End Page 261] resources which they integrated with their autumn and winter hunting and spring and summer farming patterns. British control and more extensive agriculture changed the environment by permitting invasive plants and soil erosion, all of which contributed to biological diversity and a new ecological system that strained the traditional Native American food supply. British settlements and agriculture continued to provide resources for subsistence, but they also forced the Native American population to make cultural adjustments as their numbers decreased. Nancy Berlage analyzes the ways in which the American Farm and Home Bureaus used pageants and plays, written by members, usually women, to promote agricultural improvement through the application of science to farm and home. The members of the farm and home bureaus believed that various new or improved farming and household methods that improved efficiency and profitability could be learned by watching members enact a particular process or convey a specific idea to help viewers improve their daily tasks in the field, barnyard, and home. Berlage uses the Broome County Farm Bureau as an example of how and why farm men and women should consider the Bureau an essential part of agricultural life. Farm men and women could rely on the bureaus which associated closely with the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station and its extension agents to convey the importance of science to improve their lives. Farm women also used the pageants and plays to convey the importance of civic responsibility. The farm and home bureaus always stressed the importance of change, and the bureaus' pageants and plays helped farm men and women understand the importance of adopting progressive farm and home practices through theatrical expressions intended for persuasion. Cynthia Falk uses the photography of Arthur Rothstein to investigate the Otsego Forest Products Cooperative located in Phoenix Mills. As a photographer for the Farm Security Administration during the late 1930s, Rothstein recorded the forestry work in the county. He sought to show farmers the potential for cooperatives and selective timber cutting on their non-productive lands to improve income. He also used his photography to advocate the adoption of new improved technology and marketing strategies. Working from Cooperstown, Rothstein was as much a sociologist as a photographer, and his images give us a window to a past where the federal [End Page 262] government championed the importance of cooperatives and he recorded rural life—homes, farms, and people—in an age soon gone. Patricia Houser traces the effects of water contamination at Mahopac, New York, where in the mid-1870s city people vacationed in the summers to enjoy fresh air, the outdoors, and nice hotels far from New York City. In many ways Mahopac was a bucolic...

Adam Wesley Dean.An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. R. Douglas Hurt.Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South.

Adam Wesley Dean.<i>An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era</i>. R. Douglas Hurt.<i>Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South</i>.

Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South

Journal Article Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South Get access By R. Douglas Hurt. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xiv, 349 pp. Paper, $45.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 102, Issue 3, December 2015, Pages 884–885, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav533 Published: 01 December 2015

Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-Century Plains by David Danbom (review)

Reviewed by: Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-Century Plains by David Danbom R. Douglas Hurt (bio) Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the 19th-Century Plains. By David Danbom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. x+ 129. $44.95/$19.95. Americans have always been a how-to-do-it people. This book is a how-it-was-done history of farm making in the Great Plains. It is conceptually well framed, with chapters about land acquisition, establishing farms, acquiring credit, and creating communities, among other topics. Historians of the Great Plains know about these general subjects, but this study provides a solidly researched, clearly written survey of how people made farms in the region, one that goes beyond well-known generalities. The area of the Great Plains under study here primarily emphasizes developments in present-day Kansas, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota. David Danbom is a leading historian of rural America, and his knowledge of the region helps us better understand the role of the environment, government, and economic institutions that influenced the success or failure of settlement in the Great Plains. Danbom first discusses the multiplicity of ways that settlers acquired land, such as by homesteading, preemption, and purchase from state governments, railroads, and speculators. This discussion helps the reader learn how buyers located land, paid fees, acquired “first papers,” and proved up, as well as about matters of commutation, relinquishments, and deficiency judgments. Danbom notes that settlers purchased as much as 80 percent of the land acquired rather than obtaining it free under the terms of the Homestead Act, and that they did so for good reasons. This discussion should end all romantic thoughts about westward expansion and homesteading. Readers will learn how settlers built a sod house and confronted grasshoppers, cinch bugs, and prairie fires. Danbom notes that settlers broke only about 30 percent of the Great Plains for crops and that farm families needed about $1,000 in hand to support their first year on the land. The need for cash and credit to purchase land, equipment, seed, livestock, and home-building supplies proved a significant challenge for early settlers. Women helped pay the bills with egg and butter money or by exchange for needed goods at country stores. Danbom makes a particularly significant contribution by helping us understand how credit worked for farmers, both in getting loans and repaying them. He clarifies the nuances of short- and long-term credit and mortgages. Borrowers might receive only 80 percent or less on a loan after various fees were deducted, but they still had a high interest rate on the full principal, an issue that helped fuel the Populist revolt. Banks, insurance companies, and moneylenders—that is, investors and speculators—aided and sometimes proved detrimental to farm making. Settlers brought their culture and institutions with them. Community building reflected ethnicity, religion, and custom. Churches gave settlers a [End Page 982] sense of social and cultural security. The establishment of public schools indicated a commitment to education and provided gathering places that, in turn, helped foster new local institutions. Danbom’s discussion of town site selection shows that railroads could make or break town development, and here we learn why. He cogently notes that “settlement of the Great Plains was not an event but a process” (p. 95). Settlers came and went, some got richer, some were disillusioned. Immigrants were more likely to stay, but persistence remained uncertain. Communities changed over time, but the settlement of the Great Plains, Danbom contends, is an “American success story” (p. 107). It epitomizes how hard work, commitment, and institutional, corporate, and government support enabled men and women to adapt and prosper within the parameters of a harsh environment. This book is noteworthy for several reasons. First, it provides a succinct overview of settlement and community building in the Great Plains. Second, it is a synthesis that includes little-known aspects of the farm-making process. Third, it is well conceived and insightfully written. In sum, it is an excellent study that should be widely adopted for courses on the Great Plains and American West. R. Douglas Hurt R. Douglas Hurt is professor and...

Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War Ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson (review)

Reviewed by: Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War Ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson Michael Burns Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War. Ed. Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8093-3264-9, pp., 224 cloth, $39.50. In the Civil War era, the midwestern United States, contemporarily known as the Old Northwest or the Middle West, contributed greatly to the conflict. Numerous Union leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and William T. Sherman, came from the Midwest. The famed Union Iron [End Page 91] Brigade consisted entirely of regiments formed in three midwestern states. In addition, the region produced the wheat and corn that fed the Union armies that marched through the Confederacy. Despite these contributions to the Union war effort, Civil War scholars have paid little attention to the region’s home front. In this work, seven scholars focus on numerous aspects of the midwestern home front to gain a better understanding of what the region’s population experienced during the war. Previously, many historians examining the northern home front treated the region as a monolithic entity. Aley and Anderson, however, argue that the Midwest fails to fit into the established historical mold and that the region consisted of a mainly rural population that settled the region from both northern and southern states. The region’s cross-cultural and rural nature contributed to the population’s home front experiences. Throughout the volume, historians examine both traditional fields, like the region’s economy and politics, and new areas of interest, like Civil War prisons and soldiers’ families. Michael P. Gray’s examination of the Johnson’s Island Prison in Ohio shows midwesterners’ fascinations with Confederate prisoners and the economic benefits of these prisons. Gray points out that Johnson’s Island contained a population of captured Confederate officers and that midwesterners’ curiosities with these visitors led to an economic boom in Sandusky, as well as nearby Great Lakes communities that established cruises to see the prisoners. This in turn embittered the Confederate officers, who publically displayed their disdain for the gawkers, and strengthened the local economies. Julie A. Mujic studies the experiences of college students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In this interesting and novel analysis, she finds that these young men attempted to create their own forms of patriotism through their education, justifying their absence from the battlefield. While other young midwesterners spilled their blood in the South, these students argued that their education prepared them to lead the United States in the conflict’s aftermath, which also contributed to Union victory. R. Douglas Hurt follows this with a study of the region’s agricultural power. Although seemingly an obvious piece of the midwestern experience, Hurt shows how the Union armies’ logistics benefitted from the agricultural power of the Midwest and how the midwestern economy grew in the process. In addition, the region expanded its agricultural power during the conflict, solidifying [End Page 92] its place as the breadbasket of the United States, something few historians have previously noted. Nicole Etcheson, Aley, and Anderson focus on the experiences of soldiers’ wives and families on the home front, revealing the weakening of the gender structure that resulted from the departure of so many men. Etcheson examines the relationship between the wives of Putnam County, Indiana, soldiers and their in-laws and how these influenced the gendered power struggle between husbands and wives. Since the soldiers pushed their wives to stay with their families when they went off to war, even if the wives’ families lived nearby, Etcheson argues, the “in-law relations were frequently a power struggle between husband and wife, and the husband’s authority often prevailed” (101). Aley concentrates on what the “vacant chair” meant for the women on the home front. She finds that the soldiers’ absences created uncertain futures for women and the soldiers’ families, since their futures were interconnected with their male kin’s presence. Anderson maintains that the experience of Iowa women resulted in the complicating of gender norms in the Midwest as, in the absence of their male relations, women gained...

The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century, by R. Douglas Hurt

<i>The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century</i>, by R. Douglas Hurt

The Big Empty: the Great Plains in the twentieth century

Great Plains, known for grasslands that stretch to the horizon, is a difficult region to define. Some classify it as the region beginning in the east at the ninety-eighth or one-hundredth meridian. Others identify the eastern boundary with annual precipitation lines, soil composition, or length of the grass. In The Big Empty, leading historian R. Douglas Hurt defines this region using the towns and cities Denver, Lin-coln, and Fort Worth that made a difference in the history of the environment, politics, and agriculture of the Great Using the voices of women homesteaders, agrarian socialists, Jewish farmers, Mexican meatpackers, New Dealers, and Native Americans, this book creates a sweeping survey of contested race relations, radical politics, and agricultural prosperity and decline during the twentieth century. This narrative shows that even though Great Plains history is fraught with personal and group tensions, violence, and distress, the twentieth century also brought about compelling social, economic, and political change. only book of its kind, this account will be of interest to historians studying the region and to anyone inspired by the story of the men and women who found an opportunity for a better life in the Great Plains.