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Farming the Dust Bowl: A First-Hand Account from Kansas

Amazon.com Price:  $19.94 (as of 06/05/2019 12:34 PST- Details)

Description

After northern Wisconsin was cleared by commercial loggers early in the twentieth century, enthusiastic promoters and optimistic settlers envisioned transforming this “cutover” into a land of yeoman farmers. Here thousands of families—mostly immigrants or second-generation Americans—sought to recreate old worlds and build new farms on land that would come to be considered agriculturally worthless. In spite of everything, they succumbed not to drought or soil depletion but to social and political pressures from those who looked askance at their way of living.

Farming the Cutover describes the visions and accomplishments of these settlers from their own perspective. People of the cutover managed to forge lives somewhat independent of market pressures; and for this they were characterized as backward by outsiders and their a part of the state was seen as a hideout for organized crime figures. State and federal planners, county agents, and agriculture professors eventually made up our minds that the cutover could be engineered and the lives of its inhabitants improved. By 1940, they had begun to implement public policies that discouraged farming and they eventually made up our minds that the region will have to be depopulated and the forests replanted.

By exploring the history of an eighteen-county region, Robert Gough illustrates the travails of farming in “marginal” areas. He juxtaposes the social history of the farmers with the opinions and programs of the experts who sought to support the region, and shows how what occurred in the Wisconsin cutover anticipated the sweeping changes that would develop into American agriculture after World War II. Farming the Cutover is a readable story of the hopes and failures of people who struggled to build new lives in an inhospitable environment. It makes crucial counterpoint to Turnerian myths and the more commonly-told success stories of farming history.

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