¹ This article reviews three symposium volumes: Whitaker, James W., ed., Farming in the Midwest, 1840-1900 (Washington, D.C.: The Agricultural History Society, 1974)Google Scholar; Shideler, James H., ed., Agriculture in the Development of the Far West (Washington, D.C.: The Agricultural History Society, 1975)Google Scholar; and Wiser, Vivian, ed., “Two Centruies of American Agriculture,” a symposium published in Agricultural History, 50 (January 1976) and to appear soon as a bound volume by the same publisher. Hereafter, they are cited by the names of their respective editors.Google Scholar

² The Frontier Thesis literature is well summarized in Gressley, Gene M., “The Turner Thesis—A Problem in Historiography,” Agricultural History, 32 (1958), 227–49.Google Scholar See also Billington, Ray A., America's Frontier Heritage (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1966)Google Scholar; and Woodman, Harold D., “The State of Agricultural History,” The State of American History, ed. Bass, Herbert J. (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 220–48Google Scholar.

³ , Woodman, “The State of Agricultural History,” p. 223.Google Scholar(Woodman's essay ably reviews the slender literature on methodology.) See also Rasmussen, Wayne D., “Forty Years of Agricultural History,” Agricultural History, 33 (October 1959)Google Scholar.

⁴ , Danhof, “Whither Agricultural History?” Agricultural History, 47 (January 1973), 5.Google Scholar See also Fite, Gilbert C., “Expanded Frontiers in Agricultural History,” Agricultural History, 35 (October 1961), 175–81.Google Scholar John Schlebecker has recently provided us with the first effort at a major synthesis in many years, a highly suggestive work but hardly one that provides the “conceptual framework” of the sort Woodman and others demanded: , Schlebecker, Whereby We Thrive: A History of American Farming, 1607-1972 (Ames, 1975)Google Scholar.

⁵ Perry, P. J., “Agricultural History: A Geographer's Critique,” Agricultural History, 46 (April 1972), 260.Google Scholar Perry notes that in the first 18 volumes of the British journal, Agricultural History Review, only one article appeared on the historiography or methodology of the field (and on examination it proves to be a peculiarly narrow study).

⁶ The eighteenth-century symposium appeared in Agricultural History, 43 (January 1969). The other two initially appeared in that journal and subsequently were published as separate bound volumes: Parker, William N., ed., The Structure of the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South (Washington: Agricultural History Society, 1970)Google Scholar; and Kelsey, D. P., ed., Farming in the New Nation: Interpreting American Agriculture, 1790-1840 (Washington: Agricultural History Society, 1972).Google Scholar The Society further advanced research in the mode opened up in the Parker volume in a special issue on slavery and the antebellum and post-bellum southern economies, in Agricultural History, 49 (April 1975), an issue including articles by Genovese, Woodman, Engerman, Rubin, and others.

⁷ Paarlberg, Don, “Agriculture 200 Years From Now,” in Wiser, p. 306Google Scholar.

⁸ Reid, Joseph D. Jr, “Progress on Credit: Comment,” in Wiser, p. 122Google Scholar.

⁹ , Parker, “On a Certain Parallelism in Form Between Two Historical Processes of Productivity Growth,” in Wiser, pp. 101–16.Google Scholar Parker's schema should be compared with the stages of agricultural change formulated by Thompson, F. M. L., “The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815-1880,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 21 (April 1968), 62–77.Google Scholar Also, compare Cipolla, Carlo M., Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700 (New York, 1976), chs. 2-3, 6-9Google Scholar, passim. Rosenberg, Nathan, in “The Directions of Technological Change: Inducement Mechanisms and Focusing Devices,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 18 (1960)Google Scholar, argued that responses to problems requiring technical innovation were hampered by the economic structure of small-farm agriculture. In addition to Parker's hypotheses concerning “folk technology” and organized research institutions, which bear on this problem, see the analysis of environmental disruptions and innovation in the imaginative study by Jones, E. L., “Creative Disruptions in American Agriculture, 1620-1820,” Agricultural History, 48 (October 1974), 510–28Google Scholar.

¹⁰ P. B. Frederic, “Geography and Living Historical Farm Sites”; H. B. Johnson, “A Historical Perspective on Form and Function in Upper Midwestern Rural Settlement"; and Jakle, J. A., “A Historical Perspective on Rural Settlement,” all in Whitaker, pp. 1–27.Google Scholar Another geographer's contribution on a substantive theme (Thompson, K., “The Perception of the Agricultural Environment,” in Shideler, pp. 230–37Google Scholar) amounts only to a summary of fourteen writers' comments on one locale's landscape.

¹¹ For example, Clark's, Andrew H. tour de force, “Suggestions for the Geographical Study of Agricultural Change in the United States,” American Agriculture, 1790-1840, ed. Kelsey, , pp. 155–72Google Scholar; Meinig, Donald W., The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805-1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Sauer, Carl Ortwin, Land and Life, ed. Leighly, John (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).Google Scholar Principal earlier contributors to the field of historical geography and regional ecological studies in agricultural history include Isaiah Bowman and James Malin. See especially , Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe (New York: American Geographical Society, 1931)Google Scholar; and the review article on the full corpus of Malin's work by Bell, Robert G., “James C. Malin and the Grasslands of North America,” Agricultural History, 46 (July 1972), 414–24.Google Scholar A suggestive analysis of recent scholarship on regionalism and historical geography is in Gressley, Gene M., “Land and Man in Monaro, El Paso, and Denver,” Agricultural History, 48 (July 1974), 441–49Google Scholar.

¹² , Hadwiger, “Farmers in Politics,” in Wiser, pp. 156–69.Google Scholar For example in explaining why farmers “resort[ed] to minority tactics” such as third parties, Hadwiger offers that they were “on the periphery of the system.” Similarly, poor farmers and farmworkers lacked effective organization because “elite farm groups denied them legitimacy.”

¹³ Whitaker, pp. 31-50. Gates states that the problems he reviews were among those that posed difficulties in the course of writing his History of Public Land Development (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1968), the now-standard volume on its subject.

¹⁴ Gates's contributions are discussed by Merk, Frederick in Ellis, David M., ed., The Frontier in American Development (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp. ix–xxxGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Wiser, p. 229.

¹⁶ Fite's essay is in Wiser, pp. 275-89; Saloutos's, in Wiser, pp. 45-67; Rothstein's, in Shideler, pp. 272-80; and Gates's, in Shideler, pp. 158-78.

¹⁷ , Bogue, “Land Credit for Northern Farmers, 1789-1940,” in Wiser, pp. 68–100Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Bogue, Allan G., Money at Interest: The Farm Mortgage on the Middle Border (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Wiser, p. 93.

²⁰ Hargreaves's study is in Wiser, pp. 179-201; and Wessel's, in Wiser, pp. 9-20.

²¹ “‘A Different Mode of Life’: Irrigation and Society in 19th-century Utah,” in Shideler, pp. 3-20.

²² For example, Dunbar, Robert, “Significance of the Colorado Agricultural Frontier,” Agricultural History, 34 (July 1960), pp. 119–25.Google Scholar For the larger societal and attitudinal context of western adaptation to environment, cf. Gressley, Gene M., West by East: The American West in the Gilded Age, Charles Redd Monographs, No. 1 (Provo: Brigham Young University, 1972)Google Scholar.

²³ Hatch, Elvin, “Stratification in a Rural California Community, “in Shideler, pp. 21–38;Google ScholarSimpson, Peter, “The Social Side of the Cattle Industry,” Shideler, pp. 39–50Google Scholar; Stein, Walter J., “The ‘Okie’ as Far m Laborer,” Shideler, pp. 202–15.Google Scholar The Stein essay elaborates themes in his California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport: Greenwood, 1973), here using models of preindustrial workers and their response to modern industrial discipline formulated by Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and Herbert Gutman.

²⁴ , Scheiber and , McCurdy, “Eminent-Domain Law and Western Agriculture,” in Shideler, pp. 112–30.Google Scholar For rich detail and a case study of resource allocation by the judiciary, see also McCurdy, Charles W., “Stephen J. Field and Public Land Law Development in California,” Law & Society Review, 10 (Winter 1976), 235–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ , Lee, “Environmental Implications of Governmental Reclamation in California,” in Shideler, pp. 223–29Google Scholar.

²⁶ , Saloutos, “The Immigrant in Pacific Coast Agriculture, 1890-1940,” in Shideler, pp. 182–201Google Scholar.

²⁷ Danhof, Clarence, “Farm-Making Costs and the ‘Safety Valve’: 1850-1860,” Journal of Political Economy, 49 (June 1941), 317–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Ankli, “Far m Making Costs in the 1850's,” in Whitaker, pp. 51–70Google Scholar.

²⁸ , Winters, “Tenant-Farming in Iowa, 1860-1900: A Study of the Terms of Rental Leases,” in Whitaker, pp. 130–50Google Scholar, with commentary by Swierenga.

²⁹ Socolofsky, Homer E., “William Scully: Ireland and America, 1840-1900,” in Whitaker, pp. 155–75Google Scholar, with commentary by Margaret B. Bogue.

³⁰ Schob, David E. brings a vast quantity of new information to light, for example, on the farm worker in Hired. Hands and Plowboys: Farm Labor in the Midwest, 1815-60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975).Google Scholar Tenancy in the early twentieth century is examined in an important case study by Bogue, Margaret B., “The Scott Farms in a New Agriculture, 1900-1919,” Frontier in American Development, ed. Ellis, , pp. 217–45.Google Scholar See also Reid, Joseph D., “Sharecropping as an Understandable Market Response,” The Journal of Economic History, 33 (March 1973), pp. 106–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard Sutch and Roger Ransom, “The Ex-Slave in the Post-Bellum South,” ibid., pp. 131-48; and DeCanio, Stephen, Agriculture in the Postbellum South (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

³¹ Most notably in Quisenberry, K. S. and Reitz, L. P., “Turkey Wheat: The Cornerstone of an Empire,” in Whitaker, pp. 98–110Google Scholar, and an indispensable commentary by Dunbar, pp. 111-14.

³² , Shepherd, “The Development of Wheat Production in the Pacific Northwest,” in Shideler, pp. 258–71Google Scholar; Wik, Reynold M., “Some Interpretations of the Mechanization of Agriculture in the Far West,” Shideler, pp. 73–83Google Scholar.

³³ , Cipolla, “European Connoisseurs and California Wines, 1875-1895,” in Shideler, pp. 294–310Google Scholar.

³⁴ Whitaker, pp. 75-93.

³⁵ For example, Wright, Gavin, “‘Economic Democracy’ and the Concentration of Agricultural Wealth in the Cotton South,” Structure of the Cotton Economy, ed. Parker, , pp. 63–94Google Scholar; and important recently published studies by Richard Easterlin (who has long pioneered in systematic analysis of regional incomes) and Gallman, on farm productivity, in Klingaman, David C. and Vedder, R. K., eds., Essays in 19th Century Economic History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975).Google Scholar See also note 6, supra.

³⁶ See, for example, the essays on various aspects of law and property rights, by Alchian and Demsetz, Higgs, Scheiber, and Raup in The Journal of Economic History, 33 (March 1973); Davis, Lance E. and North, Douglass C., Institutional Change and American Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Scheiber, Harry N., “Federalism and the American Economic Order, 1789-1910,” Law & Society Review, 10 (Fall 1975), pp. 57–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The classic study of law and natural resources by Hurst, Willard, Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836-1915 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, is important both for its conceptual underpinnings and its substantive arguments.

³⁷ See Gates, Paul Wallace, “Corporation Farming in California,” People of the Plains and Mountains, ed. Billington, Ray Allen (Westport: Greenwood, 1973), pp. 146–74Google Scholar; Raup, Philip, “Corporate Farming in the United States,” The Journal of Economic History, 33 (March 1973), 274–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rothstein, Morton, “The Big Farm: Abundance and Scale in American Agriculture,” Agricultural History, 49 (October 1975), 583–97Google Scholar.

³⁸ Reference here is not so much to the theories of political historians (Richard Hofstadter et al.) about alleged status anxiety and farmer paranoia, as to Bogue's earlier writings on farm-credit institutions and firms, Rothstein's on marketing, and revisionist work on the Granger movement, notably Miller, George H., Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971).Google Scholar Analysis of these studies and their impact on interpretation of “farmer movements” is provided in Scheiber, Harry N., “Public Policy, Constitutional Principle, and the Granger Laws: A Revised Historical Perspective,” Stanford Law Review, 23 (May 1971), pp. 1029–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the economic side, see Higgs, Robert, “Railroad Rates and the Populist Uprising,” Agricultural History, 44 (July 1970), 291–97Google Scholar; and Mayhew, Anne, “A Reappraisal of the Causes of Farm Protest in the United States, 1870-1900,” The Journal of Economic History, 32 (June 1972), 464–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ See the reflections of a leading European and comparative agricultural historian, arguing against “systematization and precision … at the expense of holism,” and reviewing the bases of recent methodological innovation, in Tuma, Elias H., “New Approaches in Economic History and Related Social Sciences,” Journal of European Economic History, 3 (Spring 1974), 169–87Google Scholar.