The Midwest Farmer's Daughter PDF Download

Author: Zachary Michael Jack
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1557536198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
From yesterday's gingham girls to today's Farmer Janes, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter unearths the untold history and renewed cultural currency of an American icon at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the US are woman-owned. From farm women bloggers, to back-to-the-land homesteaders and seed-savers, to rural graphic novelists and, ultimately, to the seven generations of farm daughters who have animated his own family since before the Civil War, the author travels across the region to shine new documentary light on this seedbed for American virtue, energy, and ingenuity. Packed with many memorable interviews, print artifacts, and historic images, this groundbreaking documentary history describes the centuries-long reiteration and reinterpretation of agrarian daughters in the field, over the airwaves, on the printed page, and in the court of public opinion. Offering a sweeping cultural and social history, it ranges widely and well from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres to Laura Ingalls Wilder's proto-feminist commentaries for the Missouri Ruralist; from the critical importance of rural girls and young women to time-honored organizations such as the Farm Bureau, 4-H, and FFA to the entrepreneurial role today's female agriculturalists and sustainable farm advocates play in farmers' markets, urban farms, and community-supported agriculture. For all those whose lives have been graced by the enduring strength of this regional and national touchstone, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter offers a one-of-a-kind scholarly examination and contemporary appreciation.

Author: Zachary Michael Jack
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1612492185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
From yesterday's gingham girls to today's Google-era Farmer Janes, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter explores the resurgent role played by female agriculturalists at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the US are woman-owned, but when, paradoxically, America's farm-reared daughters are conspicuously absent from popular film, television, and literature. In this first-of-its-kind treatment, Zachary Michael Jack follows the fascinating story of the girl who became a regional and national legend: from Donna Reed to Laura Ingalls Wilder, from Elly May Clampett to The Dukes of Hazzard's Catherine Bach, from Lawrence Welk's TV sweethearts to the tragic heroines of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. From Amish farm women bloggers, to Missouri homesteaders and seed-savers, to rural Nebraskan graphic novelists and, ultimately, to the seven generations of entrepreneurial Iowan farm women who have animated his own family since before the Civil War, Jack shines new documentary light on the symbol of American virtue, energy, and ingenuity that rural writer Martha Foote Crow once described as the "great rural reserve of initiating force, sane judgment and spiritual drive." Packed with dozens of interviews, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter covers the history and the renaissance of agrarian women on both sides of the fence. Giving equal consideration to both agriculture's time-tested rural and small-town Farm Bureaus, 4-H, and FFA training grounds as well as to the eco-innovations generated by the region's rising woman-powered "agro-polises" such as Chicago, the author crafts a lively, easy-to-read cultural and social history, exploring the pioneering role today's female agriculturalists play in the emergence of farmers' markets, urban farms, community-supported agriculture, and the new "back-to-the-land" and "do-it-yourself" movements. For all those whose lives have been graced by the enduring strength of American farm women, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter offers a groundbreaking examination of a dynamic American icon.

Author: Bernie Van de Yacht
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
A rich exploration of friendship and heartache in the Midwest." - Kirkus ReviewsVal Van Dyke has just won a cruise to Alaska - and it couldn't come at a better time for this rural Wisconsinite. On the verge of turning the big 5-0, the former world traveler has found herself constrained in recent years - by her job and her marriage to a much younger husband, who has grown as distant as the far-flung places to which she once traveled. Her lifelong friends are facing similar ruts. Former prom queen Crystal Brenner now tips the scale at three-hundred pounds and has to balance taking care of a child with Down syndrome and a verbally abusive live-in-father. Penny Hansen, who has that typical "middle child" mentality of appeasing everyone, finds herself constantly at war with her obstinate teenage daughter. So, when Val invites Crystal and Penny to join her on the cruise, it offers the friends a welcome respite from their daily routine and the exciting chance to revisit the carefree days of their youth. But as they prepare to embark on their vacation, things begin to unravel in their personal lives, leading them to reassess choices, reveal long-held secrets and confront a life-or-death crisis that will change their friendship forever. "Alternately humorous and heartbreaking, the novel is an incisive triple portrait of the way small choices shape the courses of people's lives." - Kirkus Reviews

Author: Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700635181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
As the United States transformed itself from an agricultural to an industrial nation, thousands of young people left farm homes for life in the big city. But even by 1920 the nation’s heartland remained predominantly rural and most children in the region were still raised on farms. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg retells their stories, offering glimpses—both nostalgic and realistic—of a bygone era. As Riney-Kehrberg shows, the experiences of most farm children continued to reflect the traditions of family life and labor, albeit in an age when middle-class urban Americans were beginning to redefine childhood as a time reserved for education and play. She draws upon a wealth of primary sources—not only memoirs and diaries but also census data—to create a vivid portrait of midwestern farm childhood from the early post–Civil War period through the Progressive Era growing pains of industrialization. Those personal accounts resurrect the essential experience of children’s work, play, education, family relations, and coming of age from their own perspectives. Steering a middle path between the myth of wholesome farm life and the reality of work that was often extremely dangerous, Riney-Kehrberg shows both the best and the worst that a rural upbringing had to offer midwestern youth a time before mechanization forever changed the rural scene and radio broke the spell of isolation. Down on the farm, truancy was not uncommon and chores were shared across genders. Yet farm children managed to indulge in inventive play—much of it homemade—to supplement store-bought toys and to get through the long spells between circuses. Filled with insightful personal stories and graced with dozens of highly evocative period photos, Childhood on the Farm is the only general history of midwestern farm children to use narratives written by the children themselves, giving a fresh voice to these forgotten years. Theirs was a way of life that was disappearing even as they lived it, and this book offers new insight into why, even if many rural youngsters became urban and suburban adults, they always maintained some affection for the farm.

Author: R. Douglas Hurt
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496235630
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
After the War of 1812 and the removal of the region’s Indigenous peoples, the American Midwest became a paradoxical land for settlers. Even as many settlers found that the region provided the bountiful life of their dreams, others found disappointment, even failure—and still others suffered social and racial prejudice. In this broad and authoritative survey of midwestern agriculture from the War of 1812 to the turn of the twentieth century, R. Douglas Hurt contends that this region proved to be the country’s garden spot and the nation’s heart of agricultural production. During these eighty-five years the region transformed from a sparsely settled area to the home of large industrial and commercial cities, including Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Detroit. Still, it remained primarily an agricultural region that promised a better life for many of the people who acquired land, raised crops and livestock, provided for their families, adopted new technologies, and sought political reform to benefit their economic interests. Focusing on the history of midwestern agriculture during wartime, utopian isolation, and colonization as well as political unrest, Hurt contextualizes myriad facets of the region’s past to show how agricultural life developed for midwestern farmers—and to reflect on what that meant for the region and nation.

Author: Ginette Aley
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809332655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
The Civil War has historically been viewed somewhat simplistically as a battle between the North and the South. Southern historians have broadened this viewpoint by revealing the “many Souths” that made up the Confederacy, but the “North” has remained largely undifferentiated as a geopolitical term. In this welcome collection, seven Civil War scholars offer a unique regional perspective on the Civil War by examining how a specific group of Northerners—Midwesterners, known as Westerners and Middle Westerners during the 1860s—experienced the war on the home front. Much of the intensifying political and ideological turmoil of the 1850s played out in the Midwest and instilled in its people a powerful sense of connection to this important drama. The 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Law and highly visible efforts to recapture former bondsmen and women who had escaped; underground railroad “stations” and supporters throughout the region; publication of Ohioan Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely-influential and best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854; the murderous abolitionist John Brown, who gained notoriety and hero status attacking proslavery advocates in Kansas; the emergence of the Republican Party and Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln—all placed the Midwest at the center of the rising sectional tensions. From the exploitation of Confederate prisoners in Ohio to wartime college enrollment in Michigan, these essays reveal how Midwestern men, women, families, and communities became engaged in myriad war-related activities and support. Agriculture figures prominently in the collection, with several scholars examining the agricultural power of the region and the impact of the war on farming, farm families, and farm women. Contributors also consider student debates and reactions to questions of patriotism, the effect of the war on military families’ relationships, issues of women’s loyalty and deference to male authority, as well as the treatment of political dissent and dissenters. Bringing together an assortment of home front topics from a variety of fresh perspectives, this collection offers a view of the Civil War that is unabashedly Midwestern.

Author: Ann-Kristin Wallengren
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
ISBN: 9187675153
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Between 1840 and 1940, more than one million people emigrated from Sweden to America. The fact that so many chose to leave to seek a better life across the Atlantic was a major trauma for the Swedish nation. Filmmakers were not slow to pick up on an exodus that proved to be of lasting importance for the Swedes' national identity. In Welcome Home Mr Swanson, film studies scholar Ann-Kristin Wallengren analyzes the ways in which Swedish emigrants and Swedish-American returnees are depicted in Swedish film between 1910 and 1950, continuing on to recent films and television shows. Were Sweden's emigrants seen as national traitors or as brave trailblazers who might return home with modern ideas? Many of the Swedish films were distributed to the United States, and Wallengren discusses the notions of Sweden and Swedishness that circulated there as a result. She also considers the image of Swedish immigrant women in American films - a representation that bore little resemblance to the Swedes' idealized view. Wallengren shows how ideologies of nationality had a prominent place in the films' narratives, resulting in movies that project enduring perceptions of Swedish national identity and the American way of life.

Author: Evelyn I. Funda
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149620980X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
In Thomas Jefferson's day, 90 percent of the population worked on family farms. Today, in a world dominated by agribusiness, less than 1 percent of Americans claim farm-related occupations. What was lost along the way is something that Evelyn I. Funda experienced firsthand when, in 2001, her parents sold the last parcel of the farm they had worked since they married in 1957. Against that landscape of loss, Funda explores her family's three-generation farming experience in southern Idaho, where her Czech immigrant family spent their lives turning a patch of sagebrush into crop land. The story of Funda's family unfolds within the larger context of our country's rich immigrant history, western culture, and farming as a science and an art. Situated at the crossroads of American farming, Weeds: A Farm Daughter's Lament offers a clear view of the nature, the cost, and the transformation of the American West. Part cultural history, part memoir, and part elegy, the book reminds us that in losing our attachment to the land we also lose some of our humanity and something at the very heart of our identity as a nation.

Author: Steven Conn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226826910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A new history that boldly challenges the idea of a rural American crisis. It seems everyone has an opinion about rural America. Is it gripped in a tragic decline? Or is it on the cusp of a glorious revival? Is it the key to understanding America today? Steven Conn argues that we’re missing the real question: Is rural America even a thing? No, says Conn, who believes we see only what we want to see in the lands beyond the suburbs—fantasies about moral (or backward) communities, simpler (or repressive) living, and what it means to be authentically (or wrongheadedly) American. If we want to build a better future, Conn argues, we must accept that these visions don’t exist and never did. In The Lies of the Land, Conn shows that rural America—so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind—has actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. Examining each of these forces in turn, Conn invites us to dispense with the lies and half-truths we’ve believed about rural America and to pursue better solutions to the very real challenges shared all across our nation.

Author: Jim Harrison
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 0887843042
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Literary legend Jim Harrison's collection of novellas, The Farmer's Daughter, finds him writing at the height of his powers, and in fresh and audacious new directions. The three stories in The Farmer's Daughter are as different as they are unforgettable. Written in the voice of a home-schooled fifteen-year-old girl in rural Montana, the title novella is an uncompromising, beautiful tale of an extraordinary character whose youth intersects with unexpected brutality, and the reserves she must draw on to make herself whole. In another, Harrison's beloved recurring character Brown Dog, still looking for love, escapes from Canada back to the United States on the tour bus of a Native rock band called Thunderskins. And finally, a retired werewolf, misdiagnosed with a rare blood disorder brought on by the bite of a Mexican hummingbird, attempts to lead a normal life but is nevertheless plagued by hazy, feverish episodes of epic lust, physical appetite, athletic exertions, and outbursts of violence under the full moon. The Farmer's Daughter is a memorable portrait of three decidedly unconventional American lives. With wit, poignancy, and an unbounded love for his characters, Jim Harrison has again reminded us why he is one of the most cherished and important authors at work today.