A Companion to American Agricultural History

Thomas D. Isernis Professor of History and University Distinguished Professor at North Dakota State University, where he teaches both the history of agriculture and the history of the Great Plains. Among his works in the history of agriculture are two books on the history of wheat harvesting on the Great Plains, Custom Combining on the Great Plains (1981) and Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs (1990). His most recent work in the history of the Great Plains is Pacing Dakota (2018). His weekly essays on life on the plains are featured by Prairie Public radio and NPR One. He remains a partner in a family farm in western Kansas dating from 1874.

Kelly Houston Jonesis Assistant Professor of History at Arkansas Tech University. She is the author of A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas (2021). Her current research concerns absentee-owned plantations in the American South, as well as a study of the lynching of enslaved people.

Cherisse Jones-Branchis the Dean of the Graduate School and the James and Wanda Lee Vaughn Endowed Professor of History at Arkansas State University. She has written numerous articles on women’s Civil Rights and rural activism and is the author of Crossing the Line: Women and Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II (2014), and co-editor of Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times (2018). Her second monograph is Better Living By Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas , 1914–1965 (2021).

Connie L. Lesteris an Associate Professor in History at the University of Central Florida. She has been the editor of the Florida Historical Quarterly since 2005 and the Director of the Regional Initiative for Collecting History, Experiences, and Stories (RICHES) interactive digital archiving project since 2009. In 2020, the RICHES project added a digital exhibit space to document Black community life in Florida, titled “Bending Toward Justice” which she also oversees. She is the author of Up from the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers’ Alliance, Populism, and Progressive Agriculture in Tennessee , 1870–1920 (2006) and of articles and essays about agricultural, Reconstruction/New South, and public history.

Alan I Marcusis William L. Giles Distinguished Professor and Head, Department of History, Mississippi State University, where he formerly headed the chemistry department. Author or editor of over twenty books and journals, his latest three books are Land of Milk and Money: The Creation of the Southern Dairy Industry (2021), Malignant Growth: Creating the Modern Cancer Research Establishment , 1875–1915 (2018), and (with Howard Segal) Technology in America: A Brief History , 3rd. ed. (2018). He is presently working on a book about the establishment of an American science of business.

Sara E. Morrisis a Librarian at the University of Kansas. She holds a PhD in American History from Purdue University. Her research interests include collection development, access to historical sources, and rural women. She is a past Chair of the American Library Association’s History Section and is currently the Treasurer of the Agricultural History Society.

Paul Nienkampis an Associate Professor, Director of History-Secondary Education, and Chair of the Department of History at Fort Hays State University. He received his PhD in History from Iowa State University, and an MSc in Physics from Creighton University. He has previously taught at Iowa State University and Michigan Technological University. His research focuses on engineering education in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. He has published essays on land-grant university engineering education, Robert Thurston’s academic career, and the electrical debate between Edison and Tesla.

Travis Nygardis Associate Professor of Art History at Ripon College in Wisconsin. His research focuses on the relationship of American visual culture to farming. He is especially interested in Regionalist art and the history of agribusiness, which was the focus of his doctoral dissertation (University of Pittsburgh, 2009). He is the author of “George Washington Carver” in Unforgettable: An Alternate History of American Art (2022) and essays on the history of the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. He served on the governing board of the multidisciplinary Association for the Study of Food and Society from 2009 to 2015.

Debra A. Reidis the curator of agriculture and the environment at The Henry Ford (Dearborn, Michigan). Between 1999 and 2016 she taught in the Department of History at Eastern Illinois University. She is a a past president and a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society, inducted in 2015. Her books include Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas (2007), Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction (co-edited with Evan Bennett, 2012), Interpreting Agriculture at Museums and Historic Sites (2017), and Interpreting the Environment at Museums and Historic Sites (co-written with David Vail, 2019).

Karen-Beth G. Scholthof, a Professor of Plant Pathology and Microbiology at Texas A&M University, is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Phytopathological Society. She has pioneered the use of Brachypodium distachyon , a model grass species, and Panicum mosaic virus to study host responses to virus infection. Her historiography of the development of plant virology in the United States has focused on tobacco mosaic virus and the co-evolution of host–virus interactions. She serves on the executive committee of the Agricultural History Society and the editorial board of the Annual Review of Phytopathology .

Kendra Smith-Howardis Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Albany. Her research focuses on environmental history in the twentieth-century United States, particularly in its intersections with agriculture, consumer culture, and public health .She is the author of Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900 (2014).

Taylor Spenceresearches, writes, and makes art about the history and legacies of United States colonialism in North America. He holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a PhD from Yale University. The University Press of Virginia published his first book, Endless Commons: Land Taking in Early America and the Origins of White Settler Nationalism (2022). He is a postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of New Mexico.

Joseph M. Thompsonis an Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University. He is working on a book, Cold War Country: Music Row, the Pentagon, and the Sound of American Patriotism , which analyzes the economic and symbolic connections between the country music business and the military-industrial complex since World War II. His other writing on country music, politics, and popular culture appears in the journals Southern Cultures and American Quarterly , as well as The Washington Post .

David D. Vailis Associate Professor of History at University of Nebraska at Kearney. He specializes in Environmental and Agricultural History, Science and Medicine, the Great Plains, and Public History. His research has appeared in numerous academic journals such as Kansas History , Endeavour , and Great Plains Quarterly . Vail is the author of two books: Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 (2018) and Interpreting Environment at Museums and Historic Sites with co-author Debra A. Reid (2019). His current research involves the study of agricultural risk and resiliency in the Great Plains during the Cold War.