Child Placement in the Rural Midwest won the Vincent P. DeSantis Prize, and her most recent book, The Fundamental Institution: Poverty, Social Welfare, and Agriculture in American Poor Farms (2022), details the methods of localized, indoor relief common in the rural US and their connections to agriculture.
Brian Q. Cannon is the Neil L. York Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Brigham Young University, where he directed the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies for 15 years. He has served as president of the Agricultural History Society and on the editorial board of Agricultural History. He is the author of three books and numerous articles and book chapters dealing with agricultural, rural, and western American history, including Remaking the Frontier: Homesteading in the Modern West (2009), a history of agricultural settlement on federal irrigation projects.
Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. He has been at UNC-Chapel Hill since 1984, the year he received his PhD in History from Columbia University. He works mainly in economic history, agricultural history, business history, and demographic history, and has published widely in these fields. He is past president and a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society.
Jonathan Coppess is on faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program, and author of The Fault Lines of Farm Policy: A Legislative and Political History of the Farm Bill (2018). Previously, he served as Chief Counsel for the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, Administrator of the Farm Service Agency at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Legislative Assistant to Senator Ben Nelson. He grew up on his family’s farm in western Ohio, earned his Bachelors’ degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and his Juris Doctor from The George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC.
David H. DeJong earned a Bachelor’s degree in American history from Arizona State University and a Masters and doctorate in American Indian Law and Policy from the University of Arizona. His academic work focuses on Indian water rights and agricultural history, but more broadly on federal–Indian policy matters. He has published eight books, including his most recent publication by the University of Arizona Press, Diverting the Gila: The Florence-Casa Grande Project and the Pima Indians 1916–1928 (2021). He has also published more than twenty articles on federal-Indian policy. He has had the privilege of working for the Gila River Indian Community for more than 26 years, the past 16 years as Director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, where he is implementing the largest Indian water settlement in North American history. He resides in Casa Grande, Arizona, with his wife and family.
Kathryn C. Dolan is an Associate Professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, where she teaches and researches nineteenth-century US literature, food studies, global studies, and sustainability studies. Her book, Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination examines the significance of agriculture in US literature and policy through the nineteenth century. She has also published on the work of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott, and teaches courses in early US literature, food studies in literature and culture, and US Gothic literature. She has also taught courses abroad in the UK and Costa Rica.
Sara Egge is Claude D. Pottinger Professor of History at Centre College, Kentucky. She is the author of Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 (2018), which received the Gita Chaudhuri Prize for best book on rural women’s history and the Benjamin Shambaugh Award for best book on Iowa history. She contributed a chapter to Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains and has written numerous articles on rural women’s activism. She has received grants in support of her teaching and research from the Kentucky Oral History Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Anne Effland received a PhD in Agricultural History and Rural Studies from Iowa State University and was a research historian, social scientist, and economist with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) from 1990 to 2020. Her research has included studies of farm and rural policy; rural labor, women, and minorities; and institutional history of the USDA. In addition to government reports, her work appears in Agricultural History, in several agricultural economics and food policy journals, and in edited collections. She is a Fellow of the Agricultural History Society and received the Society’s Gladys L. Baker Award for lifetime achievement in agricultural history.
Gayle Fritz is an environmental archaeologist studying ancient plant remains, with special interests in the origins and spread of agriculture in the Americas. She taught in the Anthropology Department at Washington University in St. Louis for nearly three decades and currently holds the title of Professor Emerita. She has published in dozens of academic journals and peer-reviewed volumes. Her book, Feeding Cahokia (2019) covers early agriculture in the American heartland. She is an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow and has received awards from the Society for American Archaeology, Southeastern Archaeological Conference, and Society for Economic Botany.
Nancy Gabin received a BA from Wellesley College and a PhD from the University of Michigan. As a faculty member in the Department of History at Purdue University, she taught courses in American women’s history, labor history, and modern America. Cornell University Press published Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1970 (1990). Articles on women, work, and the labor movement have appeared in Labor History, Feminist Studies, and the Indiana Magazine of History as well as in anthologies and encyclopedias including Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, Midwestern Women, and The American Midwest.
Mark D. Hersey is an Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University where he directs the Center for the History of Agriculture, Science, and the Environment of the South (CHASES). He is the author of My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (2011), along with numerous articles and essays. He co-edited A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History (2019), and currently serves as the co-editor of Environmental History.
R. Douglas Hurt is a Professor of History at Purdue University. He is a former editor of Agricultural History, the Missouri Historical Review, and Ohio History. Hurt is a former president of the Agricultural History Society, and a current Fellow of the Society. Among his books are: American Agriculture: A Brief History; Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South; Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie; The Great Plains during World War II; The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century; and, Food and Agriculture during the Civil War. He is a recipient of the Agricultural History Society’s Gladys L. Baker Lifetime Achievement Award.
James L. Huston, a retired Regents Distinguished Professor at Oklahoma State University, has published six books and some fifty journal articles. His investigations have centered on political economy in the nineteenth century and sectional tensions, in particular the rise of egalitarianism in northern agriculture and its growing incompatibility with southern plantation slavery, a theme he elaborated in The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America (2015). He continues to work on the importance of egalitarianism in agriculture for northern cultural values.
Thomas D. Isern is 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