In this innovative grassroots to global study, Kathleen Mapes explores how the sugar beet industry transformed the rural Midwest by introducing large factories, contract farming, and foreign migrant labor. Identifying rural areas as centers for modern American industrialism, Mapes contributes to an ongoing reorientation of labor history from urban factory workers to rural migrant workers. She engages with a full range of individuals, including Midwestern family farmers, industrialists, Eastern European and Mexican immigrants, child laborers, rural reformers, Washington politicos, and colonial interests. Engagingly written, Sweet Tyranny demonstrates that capitalism was not solely a force from above but was influenced by the people below who defended their interests in an ever-expanding imperialist market.

From 1870 until after World War I, reformers led an effort to place children from orphanages, asylums, and children's homes with farming families. The farmers received free labor in return for providing room and board. Reformers, meanwhile, believed children learned lessons in family life, citizenry, and work habits that institutions simply could not provide. Drawing on institution records, correspondence from children and placement families, and state reports, Megan Birk scrutinizes how the farm system developed--and how the children involved may have become some of America's last indentured laborers. Between 1850 and 1900, up to one-third of farm homes contained children from outside the family. Birk reveals how the nostalgia attached to misplaced perceptions about healthy, family-based labor masked the realities of abuse, overwork, and loveless upbringings endemic in the system. She also considers how rural people cared for their own children while being bombarded with dependents from elsewhere. Finally, Birk traces how the ills associated with rural placement eventually forced reformers to transition to a system of paid foster care, adoptions, and family preservation.

Cattle Beet Capital explores the economic, cultural, and environmental processes and contingencies that shaped the evolution of industrial agriculture in northern Colorado.

The social doctrine of the church simply explained for everyday life. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Pierre-Yves Gomez is an economist and professor at emlyon business school, where he has been director of the French Institute of Corporate Governance since 2003. He has participated in the debates and reforms of corporate governance in France, and since 2008 has been writing a column on this subject in the newspaper Le Monde.

The Routledge History of Rural America charts the course of rural life in the United States, raising questions about what makes a place rural and how rural places have shaped the history of the nation. Bringing together leading scholars to analyze a wide array of themes in rural history and culture, this text is a state-of-the-art resource for students, scholars, and educators at all levels. This Routledge History provides a regional context for understanding change in rural communities across America and examines a number of areas where the history of rural people has deviated from the American mainstream. Readers will come away with an enhanced understanding of the interplay between urban and rural areas, a knowledge of the regional differences within the rural United States, and an awareness of the importance of agriculture and rural life to American society. The book is divided into four main sections: regions of rural America, rural lives in context, change and development, and resources for scholars and teachers. Examining the essays on the regions of rural America, readers can discover what makes New England different from the South, and why the Midwest and Mountain West are quite different places. The chapters on rural lives provide an entrée into the social and cultural history of rural peoples – women, children and men – as well as a description of some of the forces shaping rural communities, such as immigration, race and religious difference. Chapters on change and development examine the forces molding the countryside, such as rural-urban tensions, technological change and increasing globalization. The final section will help scholars and educators integrate rural history into their research, writing, and classrooms. By breaking the field of rural history into so many pieces, this volume adds depth and complexity to the history of the United States, shedding light on an understudied aspect of the American mythology and beliefs about the American dream.

Zusammenfassung: This book shows how inflation can disrupt politics and society. With no recent precedent, mild inflation spurred mass protests, myriad remedial schemes, and partisan political reversals between 1910 and 1914. Then wartime demand and inflationary fiscal policy doubled consumer prices from 1915 to 1920, triggering waves of strikes, food riots by immigrant housewives, class conflict, and elite fears of revolution. Middle-class households resented falling real incomes. Even more than today, food prices dominated consumer concerns. Yet farmers wanted high commodity prices. Accordingly, both sides blamed and attacked meatpackers, wholesalers, and retailers. Then as now, inflation hurt whichever party held the White House. Fumbling responses by Wilson's administration and the Federal Reserve led to hesitant price controls, punitive raids and prosecutions, and a now-familiar fallback--high interest rates in 1920 and subsequent recession. An epilogue traces continuing popular and political responses to changes in the consumer price index down to 2020. David I. Macleod is Professor Emeritus of History at Central Michigan University, where he taught American social and political history. His publications include Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 and The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890-1920.