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Full-Text Articles in History
Summoning The State: Northern Farmers And The Transformation Of American Politics In The Mid-Nineteenth Century, Ariel Ron
History Faculty Publications
A vast agricultural reform movement emerged in the northeastern countryside during the antebellum era. The massive popularity of state and county agricultural fairs, starting in the late 1840s, formed the most visible manifestation of this phenomenon, while the earlier rise of an independent agricultural press formed its essential precondition. Surprisingly, historians have paid relatively little attention either to the social determinants or to the political consequences of the agricultural reform movement. Socially, the movement was rooted in a set of economic conditions and the thick print and associational networks characteristic of what I call the “Greater Northeast.” This article thus …
Scientific Agriculture And The Agricultural State: Farmers, Capitalism, And Government In The Late Nineteenth Century, Ariel Ron
History Faculty Publications
The history of American capitalism in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century usually focuses on labor and industry to the relative neglect of important changes in agriculture. Landmark federal policies from the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) to the Smith-Lever Act (1914) indicate that these changes involved a tightening and self-reinforcing relationship between commercial farming and national governing power. To understand this trajectory, which contrasts markedly with the experience of business and labor, we have to consider a long-developing movement for “scientific agriculture” that allowed well-organized farmers to exert decisive influence on federal policy from about the …