R. Douglas Hurt is Professor of History at Purdue University. This interview is based on his new book, Agriculture in the Midwest, 1815–1900 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). JF: What led you to write Agriculture in the Midwest, 1815-1900? DH:...
Head over to Livia Gershon’s piece at JSTOR Daily to learn more about the 1970s “cow mutilation mystery” and the work of historian Michael J. Goleman. Here is a taste: In the 1970s, ranchers all over the country began reporting...
Lloyd Barba is Assistant Professor of Religion at Amherst College. This interview is based on his new book, Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (Oxford University Press, 2022). JF: What led you to write Sowing the Sacred? LB: Having...
Hope Reese has written a nice introduction to Wendell Berry and his place-centered, agrarian ideas. Here is a taste: Bill McKibben’s environmental activism was spurred after his wife gave him a copy of Berry’s 1979 essay collection Home Economics, which offered...
It is a two-year degree program with Sterling College in Craftsbury, Vermont and it is run by the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky Learn more from Latria Graham‘s piece at Garden & Gun. Here is a taste: Now, the...
Back in 2003 I coined the phrase “rural Enlightenment” in an article in The Journal of American History. Five years later, I defined this phrase more fully in The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in...
Wendell Berry has a new book out. It is a collection of essays, short stories, and poetry titled The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings.  Brian Barth reviews it at Modern Farmer. Here is a taste: In his latest book, The...
Over at Modern Farmer, Corby Kummer interviews noted farmer and writer Wendell Berry about the state of family farming in the United States (or at least in Berry’s Kentucky neighborhood). Â Here is a taste:MF: Is the spiritual connection between farmer...
Keith Ferrell, the former editor of Omni magazine, lives on a farm in Virginia.  He works his farm with the tools available to 11th century farmers. He tells his story in this essay at Aeon.  Here is a taste: I arrived...
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps...
…and it has everything to do with place, farmers, rootedness, and the “rural Enlightenment.” Here is a taste of his “Manifesto on Cattleblogging“: This blog is a representation of some of my scholarly and intellectual interests. Â Among these are what...
