| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 277 words from this article are provided below; about 540 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

R. Douglas Hurt. Problems of Plenty: The American Farmer in the Twentieth Century. (The American Ways Series.) Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2002. Pp. xiii, 192. $24.95.

This book is a fast-paced tour through the history of twentieth-century U.S. agriculture. It is dense with facts of an almost journalistic specificity and provides historical interpretations that are widely shared by scholars of U.S. agriculture: a sensible conflation of what R. Douglas Hurt is likely to have seen in his tenure as editor of Agricultural History. Despite anecdotal detail, the use of statistical data is sparing, and the book contains no tables or figures. The scholarly apparatus is light: no footnotes or specific citations for assertions or judgments ventured, just a seven-page general "note on sources" at the end. This makes for easy reading, but if readers want to examine the evidence behind assertions they may find questionable, they get little help. 1

The book gives relatively heavy coverage to the pre-World War II period, with a thirty-seven-page chapter on 1900–1920, sixty-four pages in two chapters on 1920–1940, twenty-six pages on 1940–1960, and forty-nine pages for the rest of the century. For the first sixty years of the century, the exposition is clear, accurate, and the discussion of issues judicious. Hurt's treatment of recent history is sketchy, probably because there is less scholarly consensus on what the central themes and lessons are. His decision to be concerned "chiefly with farmers who participated in government production control programs" (p. xi) leads to a few questionable conclusions about U.S. agriculture at the end of the century in the book's final chapter. . . .

There are about 540 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.