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History of Agriculture and Farm Machinery - 0 views

inventors.about.com/...blfarm.htm history agriculture farm machinery AgTechnology timeline inventions farmers land
shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - Cached
  • In 1879, Anna Baldwin patented a milking machine that replaced hand milking
  • Cyrus H. McCormick
  • reaper
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The Granger Revolution - 0 views

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/...dangers_grangers.html railroad magnates monopoly agriculture farmer Populist
shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The Grangers, an organization of farmers formed in the late 1860s, were being oppressed by the dominance and ubiquitous influence of the railroads
  • Since there was no regulation of big business, and the nature of the economy necessitated high volume transportation of crops, these farmers had no choice but to give in to the whims of the railroad tycoons. When the burden became too great to endure, the Grangers organized a revolt, which eventually led to government regulation of the railroads and other monopolies.
  • The popularity of the Grangers was "less for its social and educational advantages than for the opportunity it presented for farmers to unite against the monopolistic practices of railroads and elevators and to institute for themselves cooperative methods of buying and selling.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • This meant that they had to rely on corporately owned railroads and grain elevators for the transport of their crops. To make matters worse, "elevators, often themselves owned by railroads, charged high prices for their services, weighed and graded grain without supervision, and used their influence with the railroads to ensure that cars were not available to farmers who sought to evade elevator service."
  • the Grangers read their Farmer's Declaration of Independence, which cited all of their grievances and in which they vowed to free themselves from the tyranny of monopoly
  • Munn v. Illinois
  • Following this ruling, several pieces of legislation,
  • were passed. Though they were soon repealed, they represented the first attempts at regulating a private monopoly
  • collectively known as the Granger
  • Laws,
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Cattle, Frontiers, and Farming - AP U.S. History Topic Outlines - Study Notes - 0 views

www.apstudynotes.org/...cattle-frontiers-and-farming agriculture farmer Populist
shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • During that same time, however, over two million families purchased land from the railroads, land companies, or state governments. Homesteading was difficult since 160 acres on the dry plains were often not enough to support a family. The land was cheap, but livestock, equipment, and seed were expensive.
  • Transportation to haul produce to market was expensive, and interest rates on loans and mortgages were high
  • Unscrupulous companies often acquired the best timber and mineral properties through fraudulent practices including using “dummy” homesteaders and fake improvements
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Much of the public domain land passed quickly from the original homesteaders to promoters, not farmers.
  • Railroads had made it possible to sell crops at great distances, and farmers began to think in terms of a single cash crop rather than general farming to produce their families’ needs. Railroads benefited from this trade and sent agents to Europe to promote western settlement.
  • pecial steel plows were developed
  • sodbusters
  • fertile
  • barbed wire.
  • By 1883, Joseph Glidden’s company was making 600 miles of his patented wire each day.
  • In the late 1880s and early 1890s, a drought drove all but the most stubborn out.
  • “lifter” to cultivate rather than a plow to break up the soil
  • Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.
  • With the Homestead Act of 1862, a settler could claim as much as 160 acres (a quarter section) on the condition that he (occasionally she) lived on the land for five years, improved it, and paid a fee of $30. Alternatively, land could be bought after only six months’ residence at $1.25 per acre.
  • Special plows and new machinery such as threshers and hay mowers all allowed a farmer to produce more, but the expense of the devices often put him into debt.
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United States presidential election, 1896 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...es_presidential_election,_1896 united states election Bryan Populist farmer
shared by Kay Bradley on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • One month after McKinley's nomination, the silverites took control of the Democratic convention held in Chicago on July 7–11. Most of the Southern and Western delegates were committed to implementing the free silver ideas of the Populist Party.
  • An attorney, former congressman, and unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate named William Jennings Bryan filled the void
  • Bryan hailed from Nebraska and spoke for the farmers who were suffering from the economic depression following the Panic of 1893.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Bryan delivered one of the greatest political speeches in American history, the "Cross of Gold" Speech
  • Bryan presented a passionate defense of farmers and factory workers struggling to survive the economic depression, and he attacked big-city business owners and leaders as the cause of much of the economic suffering.
  • He called for reform of the monetary system and an end to the gold standard, and promised government relief efforts for farmers and others hurt by the economic depression.
  • Several third parties were active in 1896. By far the most prominent was the Populist Party
  • Formed in 1892, the Populists represented agrarian interests in the South, West, and rural Midwest.
  • In the 1892 presidential election Populist candidate James B. Weaver had carried four states, and in 1894 the Populists had scored victories in congressional and state legislature races in a number of Southern and Western states.
  • By 1896 some Populists believed that they could replace the Democrats as the main opposition party to the Republicans.
  • At their national convention in 1896, the Populists chose Bryan as their presidential nominee.
  • With this election, the Populists began to be absorbed into the Democratic Party; within a few elections the party would disappear completely
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1491 - Charles C. Mann - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...302445
shared by Kay Bradley on 16 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • It is Erickson's belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago.
  • When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness.
  • In 1810 Henry Brackenridge came to Cahokia, in what is now southwest Illinois, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis. Born close to the frontier, Brackenridge was a budding adventure writer; his Views of Louisiana, published three years later, was a kind of nineteenth-century Into Thin Air,
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • Cahokia
  • Bancroft changed his mind about Cahokia, but not about Indians. To the end of his days he regarded them as "feeble barbarians, destitute of commerce and of political connection."
  • Samuel Eliot Morison, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, closed his monumental European Discovery of America (1974) with the observation that Native Americans expected only "short and brutish lives, void of hope for any future."
  • 1987 American History: A Survey, a standard high school textbook by three well-known historians, described the Americas before Columbus as "empty of mankind and its works."
  • The story of Europeans in the New World, the book explained, "is the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed."
  • Alfred Crosby, a historian at the University of Texas, came to other conclusions. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange: Biological Consequences of 1492 caused almost as much of a stir when it was published, in 1972,
  • Human history, in Crosby's interpretation, is marked by two world-altering centers of invention: the Middle East and central Mexico,
  • 10,000 years ago. In the next few millennia humankind invented the wheel, the metal tool, and agriculture. The Sumerians eventually put these inventions together, added writing, and became the world's first civilization
  • But in agriculture they handily outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere
  • Indian crops dramatically reduced hunger, Crosby says, which led to an Old World population boom.
  • Disease was hunger's constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts "like common dung" (the simile is Daniel Defoe's) and trundled through the streets.
  • Indians had ailments of their own, notably parasites, tuberculosis, and anemia
  • life-spans in America were only as long as or a little longer than those in Europe
  • Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with the Indians.
  • ather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison.
  • Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country.
  • Indeed, some anthropologists have called the Amazon forest itself a cultural artifact—that is, an artificial object.
  • This sort of phrase still provokes vehement objection—but the main dissenters are now ecologists and environmentalists.
  • Oxford University Press has just issued the third volume of a huge catalogue of the "cultivated landscapes" of the Americas
  • In recent years one of these caves, La Caverna da Pedra Pintada (Painted Rock Cave), has drawn attention in archaeological circles.
  • Amazonia says that the apparent lushness of the rain forest is a sham. The soils are poor and can't hold nutrients—
  • Green activists saw the implication: development in tropical forests destroys both the forests and their developers. Meggers's account had enormous public impact—Amazonia is one of the wellsprings of the campaign to save rain forests.
  • Moundbuilders of the Amazon (1991), was like the anti-matter version of Amazonia
  • Marajó, she argued, was "one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements of the New World," a powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years, had "possibly well over 100,000" inhabitants, and covered thousands of square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó's "earth construction" and "large, dense populations" had improved it: the most luxuriant and diverse growth was on the mounds formerly occupied by the Marajóara.
  • William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin—directly or indirectly created by human beings.
  • In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain.
  • But they also discovered swaths of terra preta—rich, fertile "black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings.
  • Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material."
  • "Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this," Woods told me. "Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused."
  • All of this is described as "wilderness" in the tourist brochures. It's not, if researchers like Roosevelt are correct.
  • Within a few hundred yards the human presence seemed to vanish. I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted. If that place was not wilderness, how should I think of it? Since the fate of the forest is in our hands, what should be our goal for its future?
  • A keystone species, according to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, is a species "that affects the survival and abundance of many other species." Keystone species have a disproportionate impact on their ecosystems. Removing them, Wilson adds, "results in a relatively significant shift in the composition of the [ecological] community."
  • In ecological terms, he says, the Indians were the "keystone species" of American ecosystems.
  • When disease swept Indians from the land, Kay says, what happened was exactly that. The ecological ancien régime collapsed, and strange new phenomena emerged
  • Throughout eastern North America the open landscape seen by the first Europeans quickly filled in with fores
  • Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) belongs on the same shelf as works by Crosby and Dobyns.
  • Crediting Indians with the role of keystone species has implications for the way the current Euro-American members of that keystone species manage the forests, watersheds, and endangered species of America. Because a third of the United States is owned by the federal government, the issue inevitably has political ramifications. In Amazonia, fabled storehouse of biodiversity, the stakes are global
  • Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream environmentalists want to preserve as much of the world's land as possible in a putatively intact state. But "intact," if the new research is correct, means "run by human beings for human purposes."
  • Kay Bradley on 16 Aug 13
     
    Article about pre-contact Americas
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In Defense of Django | Mother Jones - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...hained-western-racism-violence nytimes movie racism slavery
shared by Kay Bradley on 09 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Kay Bradley on 09 Jan 13
     
    Is Django historically accurate?  This is an insightful film review.
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How to Read in 2013 - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uthat-how-to-read-in-2013.html nytimes politics
shared by Kay Bradley on 30 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Kay Bradley on 30 Dec 12
     
    Douthat gives a list of good reading across the political spectrum, and suggests that we get outside our usual reading rut and contemplate a wider range of opinions.  Great idea!
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Romney's new focus: pushing a five-point economic plan - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

articles.latimes.com/...-pn-romneys-new-focus-20120915 economics
shared by Kay Bradley on 17 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Kay Bradley on 17 Oct 12
     
    Romney's five point economic plan--Los Angeles Times
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The Republican Ticket Twists the Facts About Health Care - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-facts-about-health-care.html economics health care nytimes
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  • Kay Bradley on 21 Oct 12
     
    Some facts on the health care dilemma
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Candidates and the Truth About America - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-the-truth-about-america.html america exceptionalism statistics world rank nytimes com
shared by Kay Bradley on 21 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania
  • educational achievement, noting that this country comes in only 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool
  • 14th in the percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a higher education
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • infant mortality, where the United States ranks worse than 48 other countries and territories,
  • the United States trails most of Europe, Australia and Canada in social mobility.
  • America is indeed No. 1, he might declare — in locking its citizens up, with an incarceration rate far higher than that of the likes of Russia, Cuba, Iran or China
  • in obesity, easily outweighing second-place Mexico and with nearly 10 times the rate of Japan
  • in energy use per person, with double the consumption of prosperous Germany.
  • This national characteristic, often labeled American exceptionalism, may inspire some people and politicians to perform heroically, rising to the level of our self-image
  • Democrats are more loath than Republicans to look squarely at the government debt crisis indisputably looming with the aging of baby boomers and the ballooning cost of Medicare
  • the self-censorship it produces in politicians is bipartisan, even if it is more pronounced on the left for some issues and the right for others.
  • epublicans are more reluctant than Democrats to acknowledge the rise of global temperatures and its causes and consequences.
  • An American politician who speaks too candidly about the country’s faults, she went on to say, risks being labeled with that most devastating of epithets: un-American.
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