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STS.428

Technology and Change in Rural America

Graduate · Historical course

Fall 2004

Topics

  • Introduction
  • Geography and Destiny
  • Plants and Animals
  • Land and Water
  • Colonial Concerns
  • Hunters and Prey
  • The South and Slavery
  • Production and Consumption
  • Labor and Management
  • Modernity and Its Discontents
  • The Farm Crisis and Agricultural Policy
  • Student Presentations

Readings

  • Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City: A Film with Raymond Williams. 1979.
    Listed reading
  • Scott, James. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780300078152.
    Listed reading
  • Fitzgerald, Deborah. “Technology and Agriculture in 20th Century America.” In A Companion to American Technology . Edited by Carroll Pursell. Oxford: Blackwell, in press, 2005. ISBN: 9780631228448.
    Listed reading
  • Listed reading
  • Hofstadter, Richard. “The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities.” In The Age of Reform . New York, NY: Vintage, 1960. ISBN: 9780394700953.
    Listed reading
  • Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World . New York, NY: Random House, 2002. ISBN: 9780375760396.
    Listed reading
  • Schrepfer, Susan, and Philip Scranton, eds. Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History . New York, NY: Routledge, 2003. ISBN: 9780415945486.
    Listed reading
  • Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987. ISBN: 9780394751610.
    Listed reading
  • ———. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780195174885.
    Listed reading
  • Fiege, Mark. Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West . Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780295980133.
    Listed reading
  • Stoll, Steven. Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America . New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2002. ISBN: 9780809064311.
    Listed reading
  • Lorentz, Pare. The Plow That Broke the Plains . Directed by Pare Lorentz. 25 min. Resettlement Administration (A U.S. Documentary Film), 1936. Videocassette.
    Listed reading
  • ———. The River . Directed by Pare Lorentz. 31 min. Farm Security Administration (A U.S. Documentary Film), 1938. Videocassette.
    Listed reading
  • Vickers, Daniel. Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780807844588.
    Listed reading
  • Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England . Revised ed. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2003. ISBN: 9780809016341.
    Listed reading
  • Kulikoff, Allan. From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780807848821.
    Listed reading
  • Warren, Louis. The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in 20th Century America . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780300080865.
    Listed reading
  • Jacoby, Karl. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. ISBN: 0520239091.
    Listed reading
  • McEvoy, Arthur. The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980 . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ISBN: 0521385865.
    Listed reading
  • Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0674810929.
    Listed reading
  • Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880 . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985. ISBN: 0252011473.
    Listed reading
  • Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. ISBN: 0520207246.
    Listed reading
  • Wilkinson, Alec. Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida . New York, NY: Knopf, 1989. ISBN: 0679731873.
    Listed reading
  • Neth, Mary. Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780801860614.
    Listed reading
  • Kline, Ron. Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780801871153.
    Listed reading
  • Danbom, David. Born in the Country: A History of Rural America . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ISBN: 0801850401.
    Listed reading
  • Barron, Hal. Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930 . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780807846599.
    Listed reading
  • Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. ISBN: 9780618127498.
    Listed reading
  • McWilliams, Cary. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California . Waltham, MA: Peregrine Publishers, 1971. ISBN: 9780879050054.
    Listed reading
  • Goldschmidt, Walter. As You Sow . New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1978. ISBN: 9780916672119.
    Listed reading
  • Hahamovitch, Cindy. The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780807846391.
    Listed reading
  • Fitzgerald, Deborah. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780300088137.
    Listed reading
  • Stoll, Steven. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780520211728.
    Listed reading
  • Vaught, David. Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920 . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780801871122.
    Listed reading
  • Tobey, Ron, and Charles Weatherell. “The Citrus Industry and the Revolution of Corporate Capitalism in Southern California, 1887-1944.” California History 74 (1995): 6-21.
    Listed reading
  • Dudley, Kathryn. Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780226169118.
    Listed reading
  • Barlett, Peggy. American Dreams, Rural Realities: Family Farms in Crisis . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780807843994.
    Listed reading
  • Cochrane, Willard. Development of American Agriculture: A Historical Analysis . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1979. ISBN: 9780816609260.
    Listed reading
  • Busch, Lawrence, William Lacy, Jeffrey Bukhardt, and Laura Lacy. Plants, Power and Profit: Social, Economic, and Ethical Consequences of the New Plant Biotechnology . Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. ISBN: 9781557860880.
    Listed reading
  • Ascher, Steven and Jeanne Jordan (dir.) Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern. Written by Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan. Produced by Steven Ascher. 88 min., 1995.
    Listed reading
Sources