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.

An in-depth look at trends in North American internal migration. This volume gathers established and new scholars working on North American immigration, transmigration, internal migration, and citizenship whose work analyzes the development of migrant and state-level institutions as well as migrant networks. With contemporary migration research most often focused on the development of transnational communities and the ways international migrants maintain relationships with their sending region that sustain the circularflow of people, ideas, and traditions across national boundaries it is useful to compare these to similar patterns evident within the terrain of internal migration. To date, however, international and internal migration studies have unfolded in relative isolation from one another with each operating within these distinct fields of expertise rather than across them. Although there has been some important linking, there has not been a recent major consideration of human migration that works across and within the various borders of the North American continent. Thus, the volume presents a variety of chapters that seek to consider human migration in comparative perspective across the internal/international divide. Marc S. Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University; Donna R. Gabbaccia is the Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh; James R. Grossman is theVice President of Research and Education at the Newberry Library, Chicago. Contributors: Josef Barton, Wallace Best, Donna Gabbaccia, James Gregory, Tobias Higbie, Mae Ngai, Walter Nugent, Annelise Orleck, Kunal Parker, Kimberly Phillips, Bruno Ramirez, Marc Rodriguez Repositioning North American Migration History is a volume in Studies in Comparative History, sponsored by Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center forHistorical Studies.

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.

Allan Kulikoff's provocative new book traces the rural origins and growth of capitalism in America, challenging earlier scholarship and charting a new course for future studies in history and economics. Kulikoff argues that long before the explosive growth of cities and big factories, capitalism in the countryside changed our society- the ties between men and women, the relations between different social classes, the rhetoric of the yeomanry, slave migration, and frontier settlement. He challenges the received wisdom that associates the birth of capitalism wholly with New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and show how studying the critical market forces at play in farm and village illuminates the defining role of the yeomen class in the origins of capitalism.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Agricultural history has enjoyed a rebirth in recent years, in part because the agricultural enterprise promotes economic and cultural connections in an era that has become ever more globally focused, but also because of agriculture's potential to lead to conflicts over precious resources. The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History reflects this rebirth and examines the wide-reaching implications of agricultural issues, featuring essays that touch on the green revolution, the development of the Atlantic slave plantation, the agricultural impact of the American Civil War, the rise of scientific and corporate agriculture, and modern exploitation of agricultural labor.