By Parker Shipton (NHC Fellow, 2008–09) Parker Shipton brings a variety of perspectives—cultural, economic, political, and religious-philosophical—and years of field experience to this fascinating study about people who borrow and lend in the interior of Africa. His conclusions challenge the conventional wisdom of the past half century (including perennial World Bank orthodoxy) about the need … Continued
By Jane Turner Censer (NHC Fellow, 1983–84) Many historians of late have portrayed upper-class southerners of the antebellum period as inordinately aristocratic and autocratic. Some have even seen in the planters’ family relations the faint yet distinct shadow of a master’s dealings with his slaves. Challenging such commonly held assumptions about the attitudes and actions … Continued
By James C. McCann (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) For more than two thousand years, Ethiopia’s ox-plow agricultural system was the most efficient and innovative in Africa, but has been afflicted in the recent past by a series of crises: famine, declining productivity, and losses in biodiversity. James C. McCann analyzes the last two hundred years of … Continued
By Richard Lyman Bushman (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) In the eighteenth century, three-quarters of Americans made their living from farms. This authoritative history explores the lives, cultures, and societies of America’s farmers from colonial times through the founding of the nation. Noted historian Richard Bushman explains how all farmers sought to provision themselves while still actively … Continued
By John Opie (NHC Fellow, 1980–81) This book provides fascinating insights into how present-day American land legislation has evolved. In doing so the author identifies the many problems that the family farmer has had to face over the past two centuries at the hands of the weather, unstable product prices, and politicians.
By T. H. Breen (NHC Fellow, 1983–84; 1995–96) The great Tidewater planters of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia were fathers of the American Revolution. Perhaps first and foremost, they were also anxious tobacco farmers, harried by a demanding planting cycle, trans-Atlantic shipping risks, and their uneasy relations with English agents. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries lived … Continued
Who studies roads as mini-environments? Very few scholars do, in fact almost none. Highway engineers know a great deal about engineering roads but admit to knowing little about their ecological and cultural effects. But look again. Every road is a sort of ecosystem that ecologists are only just now starting to study. Paved roads transformed … Continued