A Brief History, 3rd. ed. (2018). He is presently working on a book about the establishment of an American science of business.
Sara E. Morris is a Librarian at the University of Kansas. She holds a PhD in American History from Purdue University. Her research interests include collection development, access to historical sources, and rural women. She is a past Chair of the American Library Association’s History Section and is currently the Treasurer of the Agricultural History Society.
Paul Nienkamp is an Associate Professor, Director of History-Secondary Education, and Chair of the Department of History at Fort Hays State University. He received his PhD in History from Iowa State University, and an MSc in Physics from Creighton University. He has previously taught at Iowa State University and Michigan Technological University. His research focuses on engineering education in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. He has published essays on land-grant university engineering education, Robert Thurston’s academic career, and the electrical debate between Edison and Tesla.
Travis Nygard is Associate Professor of Art History at Ripon College in Wisconsin. His research focuses on the relationship of American visual culture to farming. He is especially interested in Regionalist art and the history of agribusiness, which was the focus of his doctoral dissertation (University of Pittsburgh, 2009). He is the author of “George Washington Carver” in Unforgettable: An Alternate History of American Art (2022) and essays on the history of the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. He served on the governing board of the multidisciplinary Association for the Study of Food and Society from 2009 to 2015.
Debra A. Reid is the curator of agriculture and the environment at The Henry Ford (Dearborn, Michigan). Between 1999 and 2016 she taught in the Department of History at Eastern Illinois University. She is a a past president and a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society, inducted in 2015. Her books include Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas (2007), Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction (co-edited with Evan Bennett, 2012), Interpreting Agriculture at Museums and Historic Sites (2017), and Interpreting the Environment at Museums and Historic Sites (co-written with David Vail, 2019).
Karen-Beth G. Scholthof, a Professor of Plant Pathology and Microbiology at Texas A&M University, is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Phytopathological Society. She has pioneered the use of Brachypodium distachyon, a model grass species, and Panicum mosaic virus to study host responses to virus infection. Her historiography of the development of plant virology in the United States has focused on tobacco mosaic virus and the co-evolution of host–virus interactions. She serves on the executive committee of the Agricultural History Society and the editorial board of the Annual Review of Phytopathology.
Kendra Smith-Howard is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Albany. Her research focuses on environmental history in the twentieth-century United States, particularly in its intersections with agriculture, consumer culture, and public health. She is the author of Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900 (2014).
Taylor Spence researches, writes, and makes art about the history and legacies of United States colonialism in North America. He holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a PhD from Yale University. The University Press of Virginia published his first book, Endless Commons: Land Taking in Early America and the Origins of White Settler Nationalism (2022). He is a postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of New Mexico.
Joseph M. Thompson is an Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University. He is working on a book, Cold War Country: Music Row, the Pentagon, and the Sound of American Patriotism, which analyzes the economic and symbolic connections between the country music business and the military-industrial complex since World War II. His other writing on country music, politics, and popular culture appears in the journals Southern Cultures and American Quarterly, as well as The Washington Post.
David D. Vail is Associate Professor of History at University of Nebraska at Kearney. He specializes in Environmental and Agricultural History, Science and Medicine, the Great Plains, and Public History. His research has appeared in numerous academic journals such as Kansas History, Endeavour, and Great Plains Quarterly. Vail is the author of two books: Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 (2018) and Interpreting Environment at Museums and Historic Sites with co-author Debra A. Reid (2019). His current research involves the study of agricultural risk and resiliency in the Great Plains during the Cold War.
David Vaught is Professor of History at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875–1920 (1999); After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley (2007); and The Farmers’ Game: Baseball in Rural America (2013). His most recent book is Spitter: Baseball’s Notorious Gaylord Perry (2022). He also has published Teaching the Big Class: Advice From a History Colleague (2011). Vaught is past president of the Agricultural History Society and serves currently as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.
Wilson J. Warren is Professor of History at Western Michigan University where he teaches courses in modern United States history, including food history, as well as history and social studies education. He has published three monographs dealing with meatpacking: Struggling with “Iowa’s Pride”: Labor Relations, Unionism, and Politics in the Rural Midwest since 1877 (2000), Tied to the Great Packing Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking (2007), and Meat Makes People Powerful: A Global History of the Modern Era (2018).
Albert G. Way is an Associate Professor of History at Kennesaw State University. He has published widely on the environmental and agricultural history of the US South, including Conserving Southern Longleaf: Herbert Stoddard and the Rise of Ecological Land Management (2011), and he is the editor of Agricultural History.
Jeannie Whayne is University Professor of History at the University of Arkansas and author of Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South (2011) and A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor (1996). Delta Empire won the Arkansas Historical Association’s Ragsdale Award. She is the editor or a co-author of nine other books, including Shadows Over Sunnyside: An Arkansas Plantation in Transition (1993). Whayne, a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society, served as the Society’s president (2013–2014) and was awarded its Gladys L. Baker Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.
Introduction THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE
R. Douglas Hurt
The history of American agriculture is the story of its people – Native American, European immigrant, native born, African American, Latinx, and Asian, among others. It is a story of considerable achievement in many contexts, such as the formulation of land and water law, crop and livestock production, and technological and scientific change. The history of American agriculture also is reflected in art, literature, music, and film. It is the story of national expansion, political turmoil, and changing relationships among men, women, and children. It is the story of hard-earned economic gains and the indelible imprint of heartbreak, violence, racism, and despair. The history of American agriculture includes life in the small towns and cities where food processing links workers with the countryside. It is the story of agribusiness in a multiplicity of forms including domestic and international trade. It is the story
