Study of the historical development of cooperative enterprise in the USA from 1620 to 1920 - describes the origins and growth of independent rural cooperatives, marketing cooperatives, credit cooperatives, consumers cooperatives, production cooperatives, housing cooperatives, etc., and covers administrative aspects, membership, etc. References.

During the farm credit crisis brought on by the Great Depression, Myers served in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal government, writing the legislation to consolidate federal farm credit programs. After a brief stint as deputy governor, he became governor of the Farm Credit Administration in 1933. Myers led the agency to two great successes: saving thousands of farms from bankruptcy and establishing a permanent, government-sponsored credit system for farmers comparable to what private banks provided industry. Myers returned to Cornell in 1938 and served for nearly fifteen years as dean of the College of Agriculture. Myers also served on the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was instituting agricultural research programs that would enable developing nations to become more productive, self-reliant, and anticommunist members of the global community.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographic index. 58 photographs and illustrations - many color. Free of charge in digital PDF format.

Seeking to reclaim a history that has remained largely ignored by most historians, this dramatic and stirring account examines each of the definitive American cooperative movements for social change—farmer, union, consumer, and communalist—that have been all but erased from collective memory. Focusing far beyond one particular era, organization, leader, or form of cooperation, For All the People documents the multigenerational struggle of the American working people for social justice. While the economic system was in its formative years, generation after generation of American working people challenged it by organizing visionary social movements aimed at liberating themselves from what they called wage slavery. Workers substituted a system based on cooperative work and constructed parallel institutions that would supersede the institutions of the wage system. With an expansive sweep and breathtaking detail, this scholarly yet eminently readable chronicle follows the American worker from the colonial workshop to the modern mass-assembly line, from the family farm to the corporate hierarchy, ultimately painting a vivid panorama of those who built the United States and those who will shape its future. John Curl, with over forty years of experience as both an active member and scholar of cooperatives, masterfully melds theory, practice, knowledge, and analysis, to present the definitive history from below of cooperative America. This second edition contains a new introduction by Ishmael Reed; a new author’s preface discussing cooperatives in the Great Recession of 2008 and their future in the 21st century; and a new chapter on the role co-ops played in the Food Revolution of the 1970s.

Significant as a political, economic, and social organization, the southern Farmers' Alliance was the largest and most influential farmers' organization in the history of the United States until the rise of the American Farm Bureau Federation. McMath suggests that the ideas advanced by the People's party in the 1890s had been incubated within the alliance and that the shared experience of 1.5 million rural Americans helped give those ideas power in the Populist crusade. Originally published 1976. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

In the late nineteenth century, public officials throughout the United States began to experiment with new methods of managing their local economies and meeting the infrastructure needs of a newly urban, industrial nation. Stymied by legal and financial barriers, they created a new class of quasi-public agencies called public authorities. Today these entities operate at all levels of government, and range from tiny operations like the Springfield Parking Authority in Massachusetts, which runs thirteen parking lots and garages, to mammoth enterprises like the Tennessee Valley Authority, with nearly twelve billion dollars in revenues each year. In The Rise of the Public Authority, Gail Radford recounts the history of these inscrutable agencies, examining how and why they were established, the varied forms they have taken, and how these pervasive but elusive mechanisms have molded our economy and politics over the past hundred years.