| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Kind of Fate: Agricultural Change in Virginia, 1861–1920. By G. Terry Sharrer. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000. xxiv, 256 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8138-2569-5.)

G. Terry Sharrer, a curator of health sciences at the Smithsonian Institution, has produced an excellent book that will be of interest to historians not only of Virginia but of other sections of the United States as well. The time span of two generations may seem arbitrary at first glance, but as the author develops his topic the chronological limits prove to be logical and appropriate. Sharrer divides the sixty years into two periods with a turning point in the 1890s. The first period was marked by war, destruction, and disease, "the harshest times any large group of Americans has known." The later period, by contrast, saw a revolution in science and prosperity and a level of rural well-being that is generally associated with the golden age of farming. 1

The Civil War was a total disaster for Virginia agriculture. In addition to the loss of life and the destruction of property, the conflict brought animal and plant plagues unknown earlier. The elimination of slavery necessitated the development of sharecropping, an exploitative system whose worst features were limited in Virginia because of the state's agricultural diversity. Farming methods were primitive and guided mainly by tradition. Commodity prices fell to the lowest levels in memory as the nation endured its longest depression. The agrarian crusade offered little to Virginia farmers and enjoyed little support from them. According to the author, some Virginians knew actual hunger. . . .

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