Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs

Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs PDF Author: Thomas D. Isern
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700631577
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs is a panorama on a continental canvas: the Great Plains of North America, stretching from Texas to Alberta. Onto this surface the author lays the large features of regional practice in the harvesting and threshing of wheat during the days before the combined harvester—harvesting with binder and header, threshing with bull thresher and steam engine. Into the picture he places the key figures who accomplished the task of gathering the grain--the farm men and women, the custom threshermen, and the bindlestiffs, or itinerant laborers. Affectionately he sketches the small details of folklife that comprised the everyday work and culture of the wheat belt—building shocks, loading racks, constructing stacks, pitching bundles into the separator, hauling water to the engine, drinking deep from the crockery water jug. Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs is a profusely illustrated study of a complex, vigorous regional culture concerned with the production of wheat—a culture that centered around the annual harvest and declined with the advent of the combine. This is an examination of the interaction of culture, environment, and technology with import for the fields of agricultural history and regional history. More than that, with its grassroots research, its descriptions of tools and customs, and its lavish illustrations, it is a re-creation of a proud phase of regional life previously captured only in yellowed albumen photographs.

Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs

Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs PDF Author: Thomas D. Isern
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700631577
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs is a panorama on a continental canvas: the Great Plains of North America, stretching from Texas to Alberta. Onto this surface the author lays the large features of regional practice in the harvesting and threshing of wheat during the days before the combined harvester—harvesting with binder and header, threshing with bull thresher and steam engine. Into the picture he places the key figures who accomplished the task of gathering the grain--the farm men and women, the custom threshermen, and the bindlestiffs, or itinerant laborers. Affectionately he sketches the small details of folklife that comprised the everyday work and culture of the wheat belt—building shocks, loading racks, constructing stacks, pitching bundles into the separator, hauling water to the engine, drinking deep from the crockery water jug. Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs is a profusely illustrated study of a complex, vigorous regional culture concerned with the production of wheat—a culture that centered around the annual harvest and declined with the advent of the combine. This is an examination of the interaction of culture, environment, and technology with import for the fields of agricultural history and regional history. More than that, with its grassroots research, its descriptions of tools and customs, and its lavish illustrations, it is a re-creation of a proud phase of regional life previously captured only in yellowed albumen photographs.

Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs

Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs PDF Author: Thomas Dean Isern
Publisher: Lawrence, Kan. : University Press of Kansas
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description


Oil, Wheat & Wobblies

Oil, Wheat & Wobblies PDF Author: Nigel Anthony Sellars
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806130057
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, a radical labor union, played an important role in Oklahoma between the founding of the union in 1905 and its demise in 1930. In Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies, Nigel Anthony Sellars describes IWW efforts to organize migratory harvest hands and oil-field workers in the state and relationships between the union and other radical and labor groups such as the Socialist Party and the American Federation of Labor. Focusing on the emergence of migratory labor and the nature of the work itself in industrializing the region, Sellars provides a social history of labor in the Oklahoma wheat belt and the midcontinent oil fields. Using court cases and legislation, he examines the role of state and federal government in suppressing the union during World War I. Oil, What, & Wobblies concludes with a description of the IWW revival and subsequent decline after the war, suggesting that the decline is attributable more to the union's failure to adapt to postwar technological change, its rigid attachment to outmoded tactics, and its internal policy disputes, than to political repression. In Sellars's view, the failure of the IWW in Oklahoma largely explains the failure of both the IWW and the labor movement in the United States during the twenties.

The Harvest Story

The Harvest Story PDF Author: Robert T. Rhode
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557532084
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The Harvest Story depicts the life of rural American threshermen. This collection of first-person narratives chronicles the eyewitness accounts of people who threshed grain with steam engines. The book selects anecdotes from over 50 volumes of material published in The Iron-Men Album Magazine from 1946 until 2001 and arranges them in a coherent recitation. The result is a story of hard, honest work, of heartfelt cooperation and of triumph not unmarred by tragedy. Readers hear the recollections of those who pitched the bundles of grain onto the horse-drawn wagons, unloaded these bundles into the threshing machine, and saw the stream of clean wheat cascade from the grain auger. Readers encounter the wit and humor that characterized yesteryear's harvests. They learn about the vast industries that supported the agricultural enterprise, and they discover the dangers posed by mechanical equipment. The Harvest Story concludes by examining the birth and development of a movement to rescue the agrarian past from oblivion. This book captures authentic voices from the era of steam-powered threshing and offers readable interpretation and explanation, including detailed appendices.

Hoboes

Hoboes PDF Author: Mark Wyman
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1429945907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
When the railroad stretched its steel rails across the American West in the 1870s, it opened up a vast expanse of territory with very few people but enormous agricultural potential: a second Western frontier, the garden West. Agriculture quickly followed the railroads, making way for Kansas wheat and Colorado sugar beets and Washington apples. With this new agriculture came an unavoidable need for harvest workers—for hands to pick the apples, cotton, oranges, and hops; to pull and top the sugar beets; to fill the trays with raisin grapes and apricots; to stack the wheat bundles in shocks to be pitched into the maw of the threshing machine. These were not the year-round hired hands but transients who would show up to harvest the crop and then leave when the work was finished. Variously called bindlestiffs, fruit tramps, hoboes, and bums, these men—and women and children—were vital to the creation of the West and its economy. Amazingly, it is an aspect of Western history that has never been told. In Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West, the award-winning historian Mark Wyman beautifully captures the lives of these workers. Exhaustively researched and highly original, this narrative history is a detailed, deeply sympathetic portrait of the lives of these hoboes, as well as a fresh look at the settling and development of the American West.

Bringing in the Sheaves

Bringing in the Sheaves PDF Author: Brent D. Shaw
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442644796
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
The annual harvesting of cereal crops was one of the most important economic tasks in the Roman Empire. Not only was it urgent and critical for the survival of state and society, it mobilized huge numbers of men and women every year from across the whole face of the Mediterranean. In Bringing in the Sheaves, Brent D. Shaw investigates the ways in which human labour interacted with the instruments of harvesting, what part the workers and their tools had in the whole economy, and how the work itself was organized. Both collective and individual aspects of the story are investigated, centred on the life-story of a single reaper whose work in the wheat fields of North Africa is documented in his funerary epitaph. The narrative then proceeds to an analysis of the ways in which this cyclical human behaviour formed and influenced modes of thinking about matters beyond the harvest. The work features an edition of the reaper inscription, and a commentary on it. It is also lavishly illustrated to demonstrate the important iconic and pictorial dimensions of the story.

Farming across Borders

Farming across Borders PDF Author: Timothy P. Bowman
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1623495687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
Farming across Borders uses agricultural history to connect the regional experiences of the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the North American side of the Pacific Rim, now writ large into a broad history of the North American West. Case studies of commodity production and distribution, trans-border agricultural labor, and environmental change unite to reveal new perspectives on a historiography traditionally limited to a regional approach. Sterling Evans has curated nineteen essays to explore the contours of “big” agricultural history. Crops and commodities discussed include wheat, cattle, citrus, pecans, chiles, tomatoes, sugar beets, hops, henequen, and more. Toiling over such crops, of course, were the people of the North American West, and as such, the contributing authors investigate the role of agricultural labor, from braceros and Hutterites to women working in the sorghum fields and countless other groups in between. As Evans concludes, “society as a whole (no matter in what country) often ignores the role of agriculture in the past and the present.” Farming across Borders takes an important step toward cultivating awareness and understanding of the agricultural, economic, and environmental connections that loom over the North American West regardless of lines on a map. In the words of one essay, “we are tied together . . . in a hundred different ways.”

The Unplowed Sky

The Unplowed Sky PDF Author: Jeanne Williams
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504036301
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
An orphaned young woman finds hardship and romance on the Kansas prairie in this “enjoyable” historical novel by the New York Times–bestselling author (Library Journal). It is 1924 and nineteen-year-old Hallie Meredith and her five-year-old brother Jackie must fend for themselves in America’s struggling heartland. Forced to leave a housekeeping job when her married employer, wealthy landowner Quentin Raford, makes romantic overtures, Hallie becomes the cook for a threshing outfit. As she and Jackie travel from farm to farm across western Kansas, they become valued members of Garth and Rory MacLeod’s ragtag crew, which includes a Cherokee, a fugitive bootlegger, and a Mennonite who has been jailed for his stand against fighting. Hallie has finally found the home she desired, but her growing feelings for Garth threaten to set brother against brother at the worst possible moment—when the dangerous and powerful Quentin is ready to take vengeance for his wounded pride. A moving story of integrity, courage, love, and adventure on the Great Plains, The Unplowed Sky captures the beauty and the resilience of the American spirit that prevails against those who would destroy it and confirms author Jeanne Williams’s reputation as “a master novelist” (TheDenver Post).

Preserving the Family Farm

Preserving the Family Farm PDF Author: Mary Neth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780801848988
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Between 1900 and 1940 American family farming gave way to what came to be called agribusiness. Government policies, consumer goods aimed at rural markets, and the increasing consolidation of agricultural industries all combined to bring about changes in farming strategies that had been in use since the frontier era. Because the Midwestern farm economy played an important part in the relations of family and community, new approaches to farm production meant new patterns in interpersonal relations as well. In Preserving the Family Farm Mary Neth focuses on these relations--of gender and community--to shed new light on the events of this crucial period. (source: 4e de couverture).

The Prairie Winnows Out Its Own

The Prairie Winnows Out Its Own PDF Author: Paula Nelson
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 0877459304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Nelson (history, U. of Wisconsin-Platteville) provides a fascinating economic and social history of South Dakota's west river country, beginning with the collapse of the agricultural economy in the early 1920s, through the 1930s, largely told through the settlers' own words. A few bandw photographs. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR