American agriculture changed radically between 1820 and 1870. In turning slowly from subsistence to commercial farming, farmers on the average doubled the portion of their production places on the market, and thereby laid the foundations for today's highly productive agricultural industry. But the modern system was by no means inevitable. It evolved slowly through an intricate process in which innovative and imitative entrepreneurs were the key instruments.
First Farmers: the Origins of Agricultural Societies offers readers an understanding of the origins and histories of early agricultural populations in all parts of the world. Uses data from archaeology, comparative linguistics, and biological anthropology to cover developments over the past 12,000 years Examines the reasons for the multiple primary origins of agriculture Focuses on agricultural origins in and dispersals out of the Middle East, central Africa, China, New Guinea, Mesoamerica and the northern Andes Covers the origins and dispersals of major language families such as Indo-European, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo and Uto-Aztecan
How a massive agricultural reform movement led by northern farmers before the Civil War recast Americans' relationships to market forces and the state. Recipient of The Center for Civil War Research's 2021 Wiley-Silver Book Prize, Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society In this sweeping look at rural society from the American Revolution to the Civil War, Ariel Ron argues that agricultural history is central to understanding the nation's formative period. Upending the myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South, Grassroots Leviathan traces the rise of a powerful agricultural reform movement spurred by northern farmers. Ron shows that farming dominated the lives of most Americans through almost the entire nineteenth century and traces how middle-class farmers in the "Greater Northeast" built a movement of semipublic agricultural societies, fairs, and periodicals that fundamentally recast Americans' relationship to market forces and the state.
In this comprehensive history, R. Douglas Hurt traces the decline and fall of agriculture in the Confederate States of America. The backbone of the southern economy, agriculture was a source of power that southerners believed would ensure their independence. But, season by season and year by year, Hurt convincingly shows how the disintegration of southern agriculture led to the decline of the Confederacy's military, economic, and political power. He examines regional variations in the Eastern and Western Confederacy, linking the fates of individual crops and different modes of farming and planting to the wider story. After a dismal harvest in late 1864, southerners--faced with hunger and privation throughout the region--ransacked farms in the Shenandoah Valley and pillaged plantations in the Carolinas and the Mississippi Delta, they finally realized that their agricultural power, and their government itself, had failed. Hurt shows how this ultimate lost harvest had repercussions that lasted well beyond the end of the Civil War. Assessing agriculture in its economic, political, social, and environmental contexts, Hurt sheds new light on the fate of the Confederacy from the optimism of secession to the reality of collapse.
"Gardner documents both the economic difficulties that have confronted farmers and the technological and economic transformations that have lifted them from relative poverty to economic parity with the nonfarm population. He provides a detailed analysis of the causes behind these trends, with emphasis on the role of government action"--Jacket
In Origins of Agriculture in Western Central Asia, archaeologist David R. Harris addresses questions of when, how, and why agriculture and settled village life began east of the Caspian Sea. The book describes and assesses evidence from archaeological investigations in Turkmenistan and adjacent parts of Iran, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan in relation to present and past environmental conditions and genetic and archaeological data on the ancestry of the crops and domestic animals of the Neolithic period. It includes accounts of previous research on the prehistoric archaeology of the region and reports the results of a recent environmental-archaeological project undertaken by British, Russian, and Turkmen archaeologists in Turkmenistan, principally at the early Neolithic site of Jeitun (Djeitun) on the southern edge of the Karakum desert. This project has demonstrated unequivocally that agropastoralists who cultivated barley and wheat, raised goats and sheep, hunted wild animals, made stone tools and pottery, and lived in small mudbrick settlements were present in southern Turkmenistan by 7,000 years ago (c. 6,000 BCE calibrated), where they came into contact with hunter-gatherers of the "Keltiminar Culture." It is possible that barley and goats were domesticated locally, but the available archaeological and genetic evidence leads to the conclusion that all or most of the elements of the Neolithic "Jeitun Culture" spread to the region from farther west by a process of demic or cultural diffusion that broadly parallels the spread of Neolithic agropastoralism from southwest Asia into Europe. By synthesizing for the first time what is currently known about the origins of agriculture in a large part of Central Asia, between the more fully investigated regions of southwest Asia and China, this book makes a unique contribution to the worldwide literature on transitions from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
Farming across Borders uses agricultural history to connect the regional experiences of the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the North American side of the Pacific Rim, now writ large into a broad history of the North American West. Case studies of commodity production and distribution, trans-border agricultural labor, and environmental change unite to reveal new perspectives on a historiography traditionally limited to a regional approach. Sterling Evans has curated nineteen essays to explore the contours of “big” agricultural history. Crops and commodities discussed include wheat, cattle, citrus, pecans, chiles, tomatoes, sugar beets, hops, henequen, and more. Toiling over such crops, of course, were the people of the North American West, and as such, the contributing authors investigate the role of agricultural labor, from braceros and Hutterites to women working in the sorghum fields and countless other groups in between. As Evans concludes, “society as a whole (no matter in what country) often ignores the role of agriculture in the past and the present.” Farming across Borders takes an important step toward cultivating awareness and understanding of the agricultural, economic, and environmental connections that loom over the North American West regardless of lines on a map. In the words of one essay, “we are tied together . . . in a hundred different ways.”
Farms that were on poor soil and distant from markets declined, whereas other farms successfully adjusted production as rural and urban markets expanded and as Midwestern agricultural products flowed eastward after 1840. Rural and urban demand for manufactures in the East supported diverse industrial development and prosperous rural areas and burgeoning cities supplied increasing amounts of capital for investment.
