Suchergebnisse

Historians have long viewed the massive reshaping of the American landscape during the New Deal era as unprecedented. This book uncovers the early twentieth-century history rich with precedents for the New Deal in forest, park, and agricultural policy. Sara M. Gregg explores the redevelopment of the Appalachian Mountains from the 1910s through the 1930s, finding in this region a changing paradigm of land use planning that laid the groundwork for the national New Deal. Through an intensive analysis of federal planning in Virginia and Vermont, Gregg contextualizes the expansion of the federal government through land use planning and highlights the deep intellectual roots of federal conservation policy

Historians have long viewed the massive reshaping of the American landscape during the New Deal era as unprecedented. This book uncovers the early twentieth-century history rich with precedents for the New Deal in forest, park, and agricultural policy. Sara M. Gregg explores the redevelopment of the Appalachian Mountains from the 1910s through the 1930s, finding in this region a changing paradigm of land use planning that laid the groundwork for the national New Deal. Through an intensive analysis of federal planning in Virginia and Vermont, Gregg contextualizes the expansion of the federal government through land use planning and highlights the deep intellectual roots of federal conservation policy.

This Virtual Exhibition features one of the millions of small stories of homesteading in the US West. Lily Bell Murray Stearns Schuld Lampp overcame early tragedy in Illinois that left her an orphan, moving through Saskatchewan and Iowa before she arrived in Montana to claim 320 acres (129.5 hectares) of "free land" under the terms of the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act. Stearns's saga captures both the risks and the opportunities of the Great Plains during the early twentieth century. Stearns was one of 14,891 homesteaders who successfully proved up in Montana in 1917, the year of greatest homestead success during the long homestead era (1863–1986), but her experiences evoke how the erratic fortunes of farm life reflected the abundant economic, political, and personal whims of the era. This exhibit is derived from research conducted for a book project, Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era, that uses microhistorical methods to excavate the multiple histories of areas that achieved high rates of homesteading success, reclaiming the histories of the land and peoples on which these land claims were sited. Lily Stearns's story, placed within the largest successful homestead rush in history, foregrounds the personal saga of one woman who struggled to find security and a sense of pace within the sweeping demographic and geopolitical changes of her day.

Numerous scholars have surveyed the creation of a vulnerable agricultural landscape on the Great Plains during the years surrounding World War I, and especially the alterations to the landscape of crop production that precipitated the 1930s Dust Bowl. Most have missed the impact of the first government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), the federal land banks, and the role of government-seeded credit in radically shifting the farm mortgage market and production patterns in this region after 1917. This article adds the critical element of economic causality to the story of the Great Plains Plow-Up, arguing that federal credit policy, in the form of the 1916 Federal Farm Loan Act, created the financial mechanism for the pattern of surplus production that has challenged farmers and agricultural policymakers since the end of World War I. With this law the U.S. government launched into the mortgage market, and provided the essential start-up capital for farmers in historically undercapitalized regions, thus reshaping the form and scale of American agriculture. Using the financing provided under the Federal Farm Loan Act, Great Plains farmers were able to consolidate and mechanize their farms, and thus respond to the call to "plant more wheat" during the war years, thereby creating the unprecedented grain surpluses that paved the way for decades of overproduction. The high yields and increased cultivation of the postwar years forced farmers to further maximize production, even as surpluses drove prices down. The economic imbalance of production cycles during the 1920s led to repeated calls for government intervention in commodity markets, and eventually to the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, which implemented the production control policies that have dominated U.S. agricultural policy ever since. The federal land banks contributed substantially to the mechanization and consolidation of American agriculture, and to the problem of surplus that has defined farm policy since the 1920s. "From Breadbasket to Dust Bowl" ...