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The
Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism Allan Kulikoff
Publisher:
University Press of Virginia
Publication
Date: March 1994
Agrarian
Women: Wives and
Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880 - 1940 Deborah Fink
University
of North Carolina Press, 1992. "The land - vast acres of rippling
grasses waiting, needing, calling to be worked. A male settler described
the land of central nebraska as a woman who hungered for the firm step
of her owner and master, who yearned to yield her prodigal production to
the loving husbandman ....But the master of the land brought with him another
woman, his wife, who could not evoke the same metaphors to voice her part
in claiming the western land."
Ain't Gonna
Let Nobody Turn Me Round: The Pursuit
of Racial Justice in the Rural South Richard
A. Couto
Publisher:
Temple University Press
Publication
Date: September 1994
All Anybody
Ever Wanted of Me Was to Work: The Memoirs
of Edith Bradley Rendleman Edith Bradley
Rendleman Jane Adams
Publisher:
Southern Illinois University Press
Publication
Date: March 1996
All But
the Waltz : A Memoir of Five Generations in the Life of a Montana Family Mary Clearman
Blew
A family's
connection to the Montana landscape.
American Dreamer : The Life and
Times of Henry A. Wallace by John C. Culver, John Hyde
Hardcover - 608 pages 1 Ed edition
(March 20, 2000)
W.W. Norton & Company
As secretary of agriculture under
President Roosevelt, Henry Wallace advocated government intervention in
agriculture, instituting reforms that he intended to be temporary, but
which are still in place today. His New Deal politics and staunch liberalism
imbued Wallace with a great passion for rural America and devotion towards
reform, which ironically, some purport, led to the destruction of the rural
paradise Wallace struggled to create. (Norton)
Ambiguous
Lives; Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879 Adele Logan
Alexander
Univ. of Arkansas
Press. In this groundbreaking study, Alexander chronicles the previously
undocumented plight of perhaps the most marginal sector of 19th-century
American society--the free women of mixed race in the rural South.
Although the book focuses on the women of Alexander's own family, it is
a fascinating profile of America, its race and gender relations, and its
complex cultural weave.
An Empire
Wilderness : Travels into America's Future Robert D.
Kaplan, Random House, September 1998. In this ambitious and
evocative study, Kaplan vividly chronicles his "travels into America's
future," a journey that begins in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas--"the starting
point for what would one day be called Manifest Destiny"--and continues
across the West, where the population is growing faster than anywhere else
in the country and multiple American identities reveal a nation in flux.
Begoso
Cabin: A Pecos Country Retreat By Mari Grana
Mari Grana
begins her account of an adventure that grew out of her desire to withdraw
to the wild and that ends with a sense of homecoming and community: "I
saw over a rise in a meadow a little stone cabin far in the distance. The
landscape of the canyon, the rocky pine-covered ridges, the long wide meadow
with the escarpment of Rowe Mesa rising in the background, suddenly became
the place I had dreamed about."
Once she had
purchased the abandoned sheepherder's cabin on 240 remote acres of land
in northern New Mexico, Grana began the work of making the cabin livable.
With the help of local villagers, she plastered the mud walls, installed
a cook-stove, and cleaned the rats out of her storehouse. She began to
meet her neighbors and to learn the human history of the area. As she became
familiar with the beauty, drama, and danger of the natural environment,
she also learned about legendary local criminals and ancient land swindles.
Writing out of her direct experience of this landscape and culture, Grana
vividly describes a world where the village church comes alive on saints'
days and the spirit of Begoso Cabin's builder, Natividad Ortiz, lingers
still.
The Big
Empty: Essays on the Land as Narrative Ed. by Leonard
Engel
University
of New Mexico Press 1994. "These essays are part of the vigorous
ongoing effort by historians and literary scholars to redefine the meaning
of the West in our art and experience."
Bird, Kansas Tony Parker
Alfred A. Knopf, 1989
"You sure
couldn't get much middler than us." Currently out of print.
Bitter Melon
: Inside America's Last Rural Chinese Town Jeff Gillenkirk,
James Motlow, Sucheng Chan, Heyday Books, ISBN: 0930588584. At the turn
of the century, the Sacramento Delta was home to thousands of Chinese immigrants.
By day, laborers engaged in the back-breaking work of building the levees
and harvesting crops. After work, many of them returned to the bustling,
safe town of Locke. Locke, with its single-family homes, stores, saloons,
restaurants, boarding houses, school, five gambling dens, and two brothels
was the only village in the United States built and inhabited exclusively
by Chinese. Bitter Melon: Inside America's Last Rural Chinese Town is a
collection of moving oral histories and stunning historical photographs
(all printed in duotone), offers an unforgettable glimpse into this unique
and vibrant community, and in doing so contributes significantly to our
understanding of immigrant experience in California
Book of
Plough: Essays on the Virtue of Farm, Family, & the Rural Life by Justin
Isherwood
Publisher:
Lost River Press
Publication
Date: November 1995. Drawing on his own experiences as a Wisconsin
farmer as well as experiences of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather,
the author offers a multigenerational overview of the farming community.
With gentle humor and rare insight, he transforms the mundane symbols of
the countryside into a lyrical tribute to Americana. Interwoven with unique,
homespun philosophical nuggets, this witty and wry collection of
musings will be sure to please a wide audience.
Broken Heartland:
The Rise of America's Rural Ghetto By Osha Gray
Davidson, University of Iowa Press.
Osha
Gray Davidson home page Reviewed
along with Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain.
By Catherine
McNicol Stock.In Angry White Rural Men
Davidson shows
how the incorporation of rural America -- the swallowing up of family farms
and the impoverishing of rural towns -- has torn the fabric of a rich communal
life that, judging from political commercials, defines what is best
about this country. The incorporation of America has brought both
undeniable economic gains and equally undeniable social and political losses.
Amazon.com
interviews Osha Gray Davidson
Other
books by Osha Gray Davis
The
Changing American Countryside: Rural People & Places Cliford Wharton
Emery N. Castle (Editor)
Publisher:
University Press of Kansas
Publication
Date: November 1995
Contented
among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking
Women & Their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest Linda Schelbeitzki
Pickle Victor Greene (Editor) Jay P. Dolan
(Editor)
Publisher:
U of Illinois
Publication
Date: November 1995
Dakota
: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen
Norris
Houghton Mifflin
Co. After 20 years of living in the "Great American Outback," as Newsweek
magazine once designated the Dakotas, poet Kathleen Norris (The Cloister
Walk) came to understand the fascinating ways that people become metaphors
for the land they inhabit. When trying to understand the polarizing contradictions
that exist in the Dakotas between "hospitality and insularity, change and
inertia, stability and instability.... between hope and despair, between
open hearts and closed minds," Norris draws a map. "We are at the point
of transition between east and west in the United States," she explains,
"geographically and psychically isolated from either coast, and unlike
either the Midwest or the desert west."
Daughters
of Dakota : Stories of Friendship Between Settlers and the Dakota Indians
(South Dakota Pioneer Daughters Collection ; Vol. Iii) by
Sally R. Wagner (Editor) Paperback
(June 1990)
Sky Carrier
Prress
El Puente
/ The Bridge Ito Romo.
New Mexico University Press. "In the past few years, Americans have
discovered that the mixing of races and nationalities along the Rio Grande--the
border between Mexico and the United States can create fascinating cultural
situations. In Romo's debut, the river has turned red and smells of mulberries.
Tom Brokaw broadcasts bulletins, David Letterman makes jokes, and thousands
of people come to a bridge to ogle. . . . The lives of the 13 women in
Romo's text unfold like verbal snapshots through third-person narratives.
. . . Highly recommended.--Library Journal (*) starred review.
This tenderly
wrought novel by a gifted new writer about a town on the Rio Grande resonates
with pure border voices. Thirteen women--all ages and backgrounds--react
in unexpected, humorous, and mysterious ways when one day the river suddenly
turns crimson red. The bridge, which the women cross and re-cross in the
course of this cycle of stories, becomes a site where the women acquire
knowledge about their lives and their landscape as the mystery of the color
of the river unravels. Romo illuminates a cross-section of border life
in classic, lyrical prose, rich with elements of fable, ancient morality
tales, and magic, all the while capturing the extraordinary textures of
contemporary border life.
Entitled
to Power : Farm Women
and Technology, 1913-1963 Katherine
Jellison. Jellison (history, Ohio U.) explores how women in the rural
American midwest reacted to the introduction of machinery into farming
between World War I and the Vietnam War. They didn't respond as they were
expected to, or as most people still assume they did: facing a choice between
driving a vacuum cleaner or driving a tractor, they often chose the tractor,
where the money was to be made.
Flight Dreams : A Life in the
Midwestern Landscape (Singular Lives, the Iowa Series in North American
Autobiography)by Lisa Knopp, Albert E. Stone. (November 1998)
Univ of Iowa Pr. "In Flight
Dreams, Lisa Knopp captures the midwestern experience--what it means to
grow up in a Mississippi River town and to wonder how it would feel to
soar like one of the birds overhead. Like an eagle or hawk, she finds ways
to 'move beyond what seems oppressive and dull' and flies in the face of
convention--working her way through a Ph.D. program, becoming a single
mother, entering into a multiracial marriage, and launching a writing career.
Knopp lands on some of the key social and political issues for women in
the latter half of the twentieth century."
Gendered
Fields : Rural Women, Agriculture, and Environment (Rural Studies Series) by Carolyn
E. Sachs
Westview Press
Grandmother's
Grandchild By Alma Hogan
Snell
edited by
Becky Matthews
"She writes
with disarming honesty about the obstacles she encountered, including poverty,
illness, rape, and unwed motherhood. There are miracle moments, both literal
and figurative, in a book whose appeal extends beyond region and ethnicity.
For its warmth, sensitivity, and inspirational
qualities,
this is recommended for all libraries."-Library Journal
"I became what
the Crows call káalisbaapite-a 'grandmother's grandchild.' That
means that I was always with my Grandma, and I learned from her. I learned
how to do things in the old ways."-Alma Hogan Snell.
Grandmother's
Grandchild is the remarkable story of Alma Hogan Snell, a Crow woman brought
up by her grandmother, the famous medicine woman Pretty Shield. Snell grew
up during the 1920s and 1930s, part of the second generation of Crows to
be born into reservation life. Like many of hercontemporaries, she experienced
poverty, personal hardships, and prejudice, and left home to attend federal
Indian schools.
Grassland:
The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie Richard Manning
Viking, 1995.
"In Grassland, his third and timeliest book yet, award-winning journalist
and nature writer Richard Manning takes a critical look at the largest
and most misunderstood biome in our country, the grasslands of the American
West and Midwest, which encompass a full 40 percent of the land.
Manning traces the expansion of America and explains how, through farming
and industry, we have habitually imposed our romantic ideals onto the land
with little interest in understanding and learning from that land.
.......Manning makes the connection between botany and democracy, and shows
us that the grasslands can live again."
Knowing
Your Place: Rural Identity & Cultural Hierarchy Gerald Creed
Publisher:
Routledge
Publication
Date: November 1996
Land Circle : Writings Collected
from the Land by Linda M. Hasselstrom
Hardcover (November 1991)
Fulcrum Pub. A new kind of rancher
and a new kind of environmentalist, award-winning author Hasselstrom embraces
old values, most particularly, responsibility for the land born out of
love for it. Speaking with an eloquent simplicity in these collected essays
and poems, the author of Going Over East and Windbreak further explores
her visceral connection with the land.
Land
in Her Own Name Available
From
North Dakota
Institute for Regional Studies
Box 5075
North Dakota
State University
Fargo, ND
58105-5075
Online
Exhibit They were
Yankees, Scandinavians, and Germans; Black, Jewish and Arab women. They
were barely past their teens and women in their '60s. Many lived on their
land for life and "never borrowed a cent against it."
Last Cheater's
Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest By Ellen Meloy
Constant exposure
to beauty, Ellen Meloy warns, can be a dangerous thing. Which is to say
the river runner and natural-history writer found herself not long ago
estranged from the rugged red-rock Colorado Plateau country in which she
had lived for years. "As if by instinct," she writes, "I had long ago embraced
the desert with the full knowledge that neither passion nor beauty comes
without risk and that these conditions of being might well burn me right
up." To regain her sense of self and place, Meloy embarked on a mission
to travel through the cold war Southwest of her youth, its deserts studded
with atomic-testing facilities and missile silos, confronting midlife crisis
with the strangely comforting thought that Armageddon had once loomed in
this dry place and had somehow failed to materialize.
La Vereda:
A Trail through Time By Ruth Marie
Colville
Pub.
The San Luis Valley Historical Society, 1996
Takes us on
an expedition into the mountains and sageland spaces of northern New Mexico
and the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. Two women -- at first
unknown to each other -- find and retrace the trail taken by Don Diego
de Vargas in his 1694 journey through this territory.
Leaning
Into the Wind: Women Write From the Heart of the West Ed. by Linda
Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier & Nancy Curtis
Houghton Mifflin,
1997
Paperback
- 388 pages (April 13, 1998)
"If you've
never met women who are midwives to calves, foals, piglets, you need this
book. These are people who are seldom heard from -- rural women, farmers,
and ranchers whose voices are all but drowned out in the media noise
of late-twentieth-century culture. They depict an American West that
is blessedly unromantic."
-- Kathleen
Norris, author of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
Mothers
of the South : Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman by Margaret
Jarman Hagood, Anne Firor Scott (Introduction), Marion Post (Photographer),
Dorothea Lange (Photographer)
Paperback
(December 1996)
Univ Pr of
Virginia
Off the
Reservation : Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons by Paula Gunn
Allen
After creation
and emergence, the first two major themes of the sacred lore of the Keres
Pueblo, comes migration, the tradition to which Native American feminist
scholar Allen claims allegiance. Her own legacy embraces three migration
strands: Maronite Lebanese and Celtic Scots as well as Laguna Pueblo. Standing
at these ethnic crossroads, refusing to be confined to any reservation,
literal or figurative, Allen views the boundary where Native American cultures
and Western civilization meet.
Piercing
the Heart By Margaret Regan. "Each writer writes out of his or her
own biases," says the author by telephone from her home in Salt Lake City.
"I write out of my biases of gender, geography and culture. I'm a woman
living in the American West who is a Mormon." . . . . "There is no
separation between the interior landscape and the eternal landscape," she
says. "The story is the bridge between them."
Pigs, Profits,
and Rural Communities (Suny Series
in Anthropological Studies of Contemporary Issues)
Kendall M.
Thu (Editor), E. Paul Durrenberger
State Univ
of New York Press
This book
illuminates the processes and consequences of agricultural industrialization,
particularly within the swine production industry, for the social, economic,
human, environmental, and political health of the rural United States.
Contributors come from widely divergent backgrounds including a former
U.S. senator, farmers, a veterinarian, a medical psychologist, an
agricultural economist, a biological ecologist, a farm organization
president, and anthropologists. Set within the theoretical framework
of Walter Goldschmidt's research on the community consequences of
industrialized food production, these contributions show that the
increasing divergence of ownership has real human costs that continue
to be ignored by economic developers and policymakers.
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Hardcover - 444 pages (October 17,
2000)
Harpercollins; Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
There is no one in contemporary
literature quite like Barbara Kingsolver. Her dialogue sparkles with sassy
wit and earthy poetry; her descriptions are rooted in daily life but are
also on familiar terms with the eternal. With Prodigal Summer, she returns
from the Congo to a "wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness."
And there, in an isolated pocket of southern Appalachia, she recounts not
one but three intricate stories.
Exuberant, lush, riotous--the summer
of the novel is "the season of extravagant procreation" in which bullfrogs
carelessly lay their jellied masses of eggs in the grass, "apparently confident
that their tadpoles would be able to swim through the lawn like little
sperms," and in which a woman may learn to "tell time with her skin." It
is also the summer in which a family of coyotes moves into the mountains
above Zebulon Valley:
The ghost of a creature long extinct
was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once
held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned
to its body. This is what she believed she would see, if she watched, at
this magical juncture: a restoration.
The "she" is Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife
biologist observing the coyotes from her isolated aerie--isolated, that
is, until the arrival of a young hunter who makes her even more aware of
the truth that humans are only an infinitesimal portion in the ecological
balance. This truth forms the axis around which the other two narratives
revolve: the story of a city girl, entomologist, and new widow and her
efforts to find a place for herself; and the story of Garnett Walker and
Nannie Rawley, who seem bent on thrashing out the countless intimate lessons
of biology as only an irascible traditional farmer and a devotee of organic
agriculture can. As Nannie lectures Garnett, "Everything alive is connected
to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help
you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite
you, and that's the moral of the story."
Structurally, that gossamer web
is the story: images, phrases, and events link the narratives, and these
echoes are rarely obvious, always serendipitous. Kingsolver is one of those
authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder
and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited
Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her
extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the
line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American
literature. --Kelly Flynn
National
Book Award Winner 1999 Plainsong Kent Haruf
(October 1999)
Knopf.
Holt, Colorado, is the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone's
business before that business even happens. In a way, that's true of the
book, too. There's not a lot of suspense here, plotwise; you can see each
narrative twist and turn coming several miles down the pike. What
Plainsong has instead is note-perfect dialogue, surrounded by prose
that's straightforward yet rich in particulars: "a woman walking a white
lapdog on a piece of ribbon," glimpsed from a car window; the boys' mother,
her face "as pale as schoolhouse chalk"; the smells of hay and manure,
the variations of prairie light.
Preserving
the Family Farm: Women,
Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 Mary C. Neth
Publisher:
Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication
Date: January 1995
Promise
to the Land: Essays on Rural Women Joan M. Jensen
University
of New Mexico Press, 1991. The collection begins "with personal accounts
of the author's own experiences on a farm commune in the 1970s and those
of her German immigrant grandmother in Wisconsin in the early 1900s. .
. . Essays on Seneca women in New York, black women in Maryland, and Pueblo
and Hispanic women in the Southwest document strategies used by diverse
rural women to survive difficult transitions. The collection concludes
with a look at modern attempts to retain family farms and a survey of new
directions or research...................'.the personal is political.'"
Red Dirt:
Growing up Okie Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Ortiz Dunbar
Publisher:
Routledge
Publication
Date: April 1997. Growing up as "poor white trash" in post-Depression
Oklahoma is a mixed legacy for California State professor of ethnic and
women's studies Dunbar-Ortiz (The Great Sioux Nation). It is as much a
source of pride as it is a source of shame. Even when she began work on
these absorbing memoirs, her interest in rural Oklahoma was academic, not
personal; but meeting up with displaced "Okie bard" Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel
changed all that. Dunbar-Ortiz's account of her childhood, adolescence
and early adulthood is infused with a hidden love for the very roots she
disdains. "Just below the skin that I show the world resides a peasant
girl who absorbed ancient memories of the land."
Review from
Los Angeles Times:
America--urban
America, that is--has never quite made up its mind about its rural areas.
Are they stifling backwaters, incubators of ignorance, violence and
really bad haircuts? Or are they fountainheads of our national identity,
populated by the noble descendants of Jefferson's yeoman farmers, full
of "the old virtues" of hard work, fair play and decency? Is rurality something
to escape from or aspire to? To put the question a different way: Which
more accurately captures the essence of rural America: "Deliverance"
or "The Grapes of Wrath"? The truth, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
reveals in her richly textured autobiography, "Red Dirt," is that rural
America contains the squeal-like-a-pig horrors of James Dickey's
Chattanooga River, the quiet heroism of Steinbeck's Tom Joad and
much more besides. There is complexity in them thar' hills. And why not?
We're talking about a huge expanse of land that ranges across our
continent. More to the point, each rural community is itself a mixed
bag, containing the many soaring ideals and hateful passions which, taken
together, make America American. There are many qualities to praise in
"Red Dirt": its masterful evocation of a time and place, its telling details
of both the pain and beauty of rural life, its straightforward yet elegant
prose. But Dunbar-Ortiz's most important achievement--in a book filled
with them--is to put class back on the rural map where it belongs. Without
stooping to mere polemics, Dunbar-Ortiz's story is steeped in class awareness.
And that's important, for without the compass-rose of class, rural America
will remain forever terra incognita: quaint, mythic and meaningless.
Rivers of
Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West Donald Worster
Publisher:
Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Publication
Date: March 1992
Rural Hours Susan Fenimore
Cooper
Univ of Georgia
Press. In Rural Hours, Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894), daughter of the
famed novelist James Fenimore Cooper, records a year in the life of the
fields and woods surrounding her home.
Rural Hours
is considered to be the first extended piece of nature writing by an American
woman, and as such it should be of interest to a wide range of readers,
from naturalists to students of regional literature and women's history.
Rural Woman
Battering and the Justice System: An Ethnography Neil Websdale
Sage Series
on Violence Against Women
Sage Publications
The Solace
of Open Spaces Gretel EhrlichViking,
1985. "If anything is endemic to Wyoming, it is wind. This
big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates,
and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially
shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning
the sage." . . ."Because these men work with animals, not machines or numbers,
because they live outside in landscapes of torrential beauty, because they
are confined to a place and a routine embellished with awesome variables,
because calves die in the arms that pulled others into life, because they
go to the mountains as if on pilgrimage to find out what makes a herd of
elk tick, their strength is also a softness, their toughness, a rare delicacy."
Take the
Next Exit: New Views of the Iowa Landscape Edited by
Robert Sayre
Iowa State
University Press. Editor Robert Sayre joins twelve other contributors
to present this follow-up to his 1989 book, Take This Exit: Rediscovering
the Iowa Landscape. The landscape of Iowa has changed in the past decade
and Sayre and contributors present the new sites of Iowa. Targeted at native
Iowans and tourists alike, the book contains four sections complete with
photographs, maps, and essays. Publication Date: 2000
A Thousand
Acres by Jane Smiley
Aging Larry
Cook announces his intention to turn over his 1,000-acre farm--one of the
largest in Zebulon County, Iowa--to his three daughters, Caroline, Ginny
and Rose. A man of harsh sensibilities, he carves Caroline out of the deal
because she has the nerve to be less than enthusiastic about her father's
generosity. While Larry Cook deteriorates into a pathetic drunk, his daughters
are left to cope with the often grim realities of life on a family farm--from
battering husbands to cutthroat lenders. In this winner of the 1991 National
Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Smiley captures the essence of such
a life with stark, painful detail. . .
Under Western
Skies -- Nature and History in the American West Donald Worster
Oxford University
Press, 1992
"Conveying
the power of the new western history with eleven eloquent and graceful
essays, Donald Worster moves away from the story of the West as glorious
tales of conquest, Manifest Destiny, and rugged individualism by presenting
western history as an unfolding relationship between man and nature, and
the forging of a multicultural society........Identifying himself as an
environmental historian, he writes compellingly of the changing relationship
between the land, Native Americans, and the descendants of Europe."
-- from jacket
The Unsettling
of America: Culture & Agriculture Wendell Berry
Publisher:
Sierra Club Books
Commentary
on Berry from Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska
1880 - 1940, Deborah Fink: Wendell Berry has been the most eloquent
literary exponent of modern agrarian ideology. In The Unsettling of America,
Berry laid out a compelling restatement of classical Jeffersonian agrarianism
in which the return to intimate connection with the land was exalted as
the best route to individual and a social wholeness. Agriculture,
according to Berry, was the foundation of domestic order and peace.
Like Jefferson’s, Berry’s agrarianism was gendered, the major actors being
male, and he tied his vision directly to the institution of marriage and
to women’s fertility. Berry . . . considered marriage the primary
connection among humans and agriculture the primary connection between
humans and the earth. Sexuality, he argued, should not be separated
from fertility; modern birth control technology destroyed the natural order
and fostered sexual amorality. . . . . . .Berry did not evoke marriage
and fertility metaphorically; he used them as the concrete and definitive
connections that give coherence to his vision of an agrarian culture.
Bad or broken relationships, in this view, came from industrial development
and cities. A favorable review of a recent novel by Berry did voice
a reservation, immediately followed by a dismissal of that reservation:
“Berry tends to objectify women as objects of worship or beauty or corporate
success. Still, his impassioned commitment to the family farm and
his dithyrambic prose mark this as a book worth reading.” (Progressive
1988, 47). Once again, the treatment of women was overlooked for the good
of the farm. Whatever complaints women might have had paled in the
light of real issues.
Visions
of American Agriculture Edited by
William Lockeretz
Publisher:
Iowa State University Press. Comprehensive in its scope, Visions
of American Agriculture discusses the issues that confront agriculture
today--environmental degradation, declining rural communities, economic
inequities, and changing national and global realities. In response to
these challenges, the authors develop ideas about agriculture that preserve
and refine the best of traditions, while promoting new approaches to farm
life, rural communities, the food system, applications of science and technology,
and enlightened policies. Concerned with the fate of individuals, families,
and communities, their proposals look beyond the next farm bill and the
nearest crisis to the evolving future of the nation--a future in which
agriculture, however transformed, will still be at the heart of American
life. Publication Date: 2000
Watching
Our Crops Come In By Clifton
Taulbert
Viking.
Clifton Taulbert, author of the previously applauded "When We Were Colored"
and "The Last Train North," continues in this short book his autobiographical
reminiscences of growing up black and poor in a tiny town in the Mississippi
Delta on the cusp of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. "Watching
Our Crops Come In" is an eloquent and moving account of how a man comes
to appreciate and understand his life and times and, aside from its obvious
appeal to a general audience, ought to be required reading for young people,
regardless of race or ethnic origin.
Where the
Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs; Living
and Writing in the West Wallace Stegner
Random House
1992. "Wallace Stegner, born in Iowa, 'lived in twenty places in
eight states and Canada,' all over the West.....Along the way, he has earned
the rewards of a lifetime as novelist, short story writer, and essayist,
historian, biographer, and frontline conservationist. (Says Wendell
Berry, 'He is a new kind of American writer, one who not only writes about
his region, but also does his best to protect it...from its would-be exploiters
and destroyers.'"
"Aridity,
more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character.
It is aridity that gives the air its special dry clarity; aridity that
puts brilliance in the light and polishes and enlarges the stars; aridity
that leads the grasses to evolve as bunches rather than as turf; aridity
that exposes the pigmentation of the raw earth and limits, almost eliminates,
the color of cholorphyll, aridity that erodes the earth in cliffs and badlands
rather than in softened and vegetated slopes........aridity still calls
the tune, directs our tinkering, prevents the healing of our mistakes;
and vast unwatered reaches still emphasize the contrast between the desert
and the sown."
"Cooperation
was one lesson the West enforced, and it was learned hard. Bernard
DeVoto once caustically remarked, in connection with the myth of western
individualism, that the only real individualists in the West had wound
up on one end of a rope whose other end was in the hands of a bunch of
cooperators."
Windbreak
: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains by Linda M.
Hasselstrom
(June 1987)
Barn Owl Books.
Editorial Review. From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister.
South Dakota is a land where the only rule is "you can never tell what
a bobtail cow will do." In the winter, the temperature can drop to minus
fifty-six - if the wind only blows twenty-five miles an hour. Spring means
getting up at ten p.m., midnight, and two a.m. to check on pregnant cows.
Snow storms at the end of April can decimate a vegetable garden. In the
summer, you can spend fourteen hours a day haying and the rest of the time
watching for fires. Then there's canning, drying, and freezing to get ready
for winter again. So why would anyone want to be a rancher in South Dakota?
Not for money - Linda Hasselstrom's neighbors say they could make more
selling their farms and living off the interest. Yet as she takes us, day
by day, through one year, we become immersed in the details and moments
that make up one rancher's life.
Wisconsin
Death Trip Michael Lesy
Preface by
Warren Susman
University
of New Mexico Press. "Protestants behaving strangely in the 1890's.
. . . an outbreak of craziness--multiple murders, suicides, ghost sightings,
epidemics, guntoting teenagers, schoolmarms hooked on cocaine and general
mental illness (well, an insane asylum was nearby)--all in a little town
called Black River Falls, populated mostly by German and Scandinavian immigrants.--New
York Times. First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life
in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic.
Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910
by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.
Women of
the Range: Women's Roles in the Texas Beef Cattle Industry Elizabeth
Maret
Texas A&M
University Press, 1993. "Women of the Range describes the roles of
women in the Texas cattle industry of the past, the present and the likely
future. Elizabeth Maret, a sociologist and rancher, tells the story
of the women who serve as an often unpaid labor force in this classic American
enterprise. Through profiles of typical (and some atypical) women,
with photographs she took of them at work, Maret shows how women serve
not only as 'keepers of the land,' but also as a force for modernization
in the cattle industry."
Article,
Photo Essay, Tour, Slide Show - Reaping What Was Sown on the
Magnolia Plantation Presented by The New York Times
Part of a series "How Race is Lived
in America" ATCHITOCHES, La. -- At the south edge of Magnolia Plantation,
eight simple cabins stood in a field of clover. Generations of whitewash
were peeling from the mud-brick walls. All but one front porch had rotted
away, and there were gaping holes where doors and windows used to be.
