Dr. George B Ellenberg

EXCERPT: This is a peach of a book. While William Thomas Okie entitled his study The Georgia Peach, the peach is but the hard pit of the book. Tales of people, places, markets, the United States Department of Agriculture, overproduction, cooperatives, racism, Yankees, and a host of other interrelated topics flesh out the story. The book is, in short, a familiar southern narrative that revolves around horticulture, not around staple crop production. The focus sets the study apart well enough, but Okie’s ability to weave disparate threads into a coherent and engaging whole makes it a model for other historians to follow and explains why the book has garnered awards on many fronts.

EXCERPT: The power of the Jeffersonian ideal in American agriculture is striking. Although most of America’s food is produced by capital-intensive, mechanized, and industrialized production processes, the small, family-owned, community-based farm holds a special place in American history. What if, the question goes, alternative policy decisions were made that favored small landowners? It is merely a hypothetical question, because a large body of historical research indicates that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) favored large landowners over small, white farmers over those of color, and mechanization over traditional farming. Given USDA biases, practically from its creation, in favor of consolidation and economies of scale, alternate visions were unable to survive the political and policy debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps more surprising is the strength and longevity of movements that argued for a more equitable policy structure that would have presumably resulted in a very different set of opportunities for Americans interested in staying on the land as farmers.

EXCERPT: The essays in Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule span a wide range of perspectives. Some focus on the sheer weight of racism and its stifling effect on efforts by African American farmers to become landowners, while others focus more on the triumphs of farm families in the face of Jim Crow. The rich yet discrete nature of these studies, however, highlights opportunities for future scholarship and the need for many more localized studies, as well as the need for scholars to begin to synthesize the experiences of African American farm families.