Agriculture

Derek Leebaert | Spring 2024

Many historians and the author of a recent book have seriously misjudged the influential former vice president and cabinet secretary.

The Mischievous Morris Sisters

Catherine McNeur | Winter 2024

Two gifted sisters in Philadelphia helped to transform early American science.

We Reap What He Reaped

John Steele Gordon | August/September 2004

Cyrus McCormick takes on a major problem with agriculture.

The Conundrum Of Corn

Joseph Kastner | August/September 1980

It’s our most important, profitable, and adaptable crop—the true American staple. But where did it come from?

In 1748 an inquisitive Swede named Peter Kalm, a protégé of the great botanist Linnaeus, came to America to find plants that could be useful in his country. He went around asking questions of everybody about everything.

George Washington Carver and the Peanut

Barry Mackintosh | August 1977

New Light on a Much-Loved Myth

The election of a peanut-growing President has evoked much journalistic analysis of his rural Southern roots.

The Social History Of A Singular Fruit

T. H. Watkins | April 1977

In southern California the orange found a home.

For more than thirty years it stood at the corner of Highland Avenue and Del Rosa Avenue in San Bernardino, California, bordered at the rear by a line of eucalyptus trees and behind that by a thirty-acre grove of fat green trees that joined others in a march to the foothills of the San Bernardino

Mules

Betty W. Carter | December 1976

IN THE DELTA

The low-lying Delta—six and a half million acres of land rich with soil left by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers in flood—was first opened to a cotton-hungry world in the mid-1820’s. The price of cotton was high.

Saving the Longhorns

John I. White | June 1974

These hardy Texas beasts with “too much legs, horns, and speed” had long since been replaced by stodgier breeds. Now they were facing extinction…

If you are someone who thought the Texas longhorn was as dead as the passenger pigeon, here is a bit of news.

“In This Proud Land”

Nancy Wood | August 1973

Charlie Russell’s Lost West

Brian W. Dippie | April 1973

Charles Marion Russell, born outside St. Louis, in Oak Hill, Missouri, of a locally prominent family in 1864, came west to Montana Territory four days short of his sixteenth birthday.

The Late, Late Frontier

Gerald Carson | April 1972

What started as fun and games at spring roundups is now a multi-million-dollar sport called rodeo

The crowd roars. The bell clangs. The chute gate swings wide and a beleaguered animal dashes into the arena to put on an exciting exhibition of pain and panic.

“We Are Going To Do Away With These Boys …”

Pete Daniel | April 1972

The black laborers on John Williams’ plantation never seemed to leave or complain. It took some digging to find out why

The Deadly Dust: The Unhappy History Of DDT

Kenneth S. Davis | February 1971

Everyone knows a little about the rise and fall of DDT—how it was once hailed as a great boon to mankind; how useful it was in field and garden, house and yard; and how at last to our dismay it was unmasked as a killer, the chemical Al Capone, a threat to our

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.