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Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians In the years after World War I, Southern farm women found their world changing. A postwar plunge in farm prices stretched into a twenty-year agricultural depression and New Deal programs eventually transformed the economy. Many families left their land to make way for larger commercial farms. New industries and the intervention of big government in once insular communities marked a turning point in the struggle of upcountry women—forcing new choices and the redefinition of traditional ways of life. Melissa Walker's All We Knew Was to Farm draws on interviews, archives, and family and government records to reconstruct the conflict between rural women and bewildering and unsettling change. Some women adapted by becoming partners in farm operations, adopting the roles of consumers and homemakers, taking off-farm jobs, or leaving the land. The material lives of rural upcountry women improved dramatically by midcentury—yet in becoming middle class, Walker concludes, the women found their experiences both broadened and circumscribed.
Outlines the Department's organizational development and its response to changing conditions - national and international, scientific and economic. Appendix includes biographies of officials, a chronology of major events in USDA, etc.
Between 1900 and 1940 American family farming gave way to what came to be called agribusiness. Government policies, consumer goods aimed at rural markets, and the increasing consolidation of agricultural industries all combined to bring about changes in farming strategies that had been in use since the frontier era. Because the Midwestern farm economy played an important part in the relations of family and community, new approaches to farm production meant new patterns in interpersonal relations as well. In Preserving the Family Farm Mary Neth focuses on these relations--of gender and community--to shed new light on the events of this crucial period. (source: 4e de couverture).
Describes the goals and accomplishments of the Wilson administration, and portrays his strangths as a leader. Bibliog.
For over twenty years, James W. Cortada has pioneered research into how information shapes society. In this book he tells the story of how information evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. Cortada argues that information increased in quantity, became more specialized by discipline (e.g., mathematics, science, political science), and more organized. Information increased in volume due to a series of innovations, such as the electrification of communications and the development of computers, but also due to the organization of facts and knowledge by discipline, making it easier to manage and access. He looks at what major disciplines have done to shape the nature of modern information, dev...
This book describes twelve inventions that transformed the United States from a rural and small-town community to an industrial country of unprecedented power. These inventions demonstrate that no one person is ever responsible for technological advances and that the culture produces a number of people who work together to create each new invention. The book also shows the influences of technology on society and examines the beliefs and attitudes of those who partake in technological advances. The book is both a sociological analysis and a history of technology in the United States in the past two hundred years.