A01=Steven Stoll
agriculture
american west
Author_Steven Stoll
california
california growers
capitalism
Category=NHK
Category=WQH
citrus
coastal plains
cultivation
economics
environmental impact
environmental studies
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
farming
food and agriculture
food studies
frontier
fruit
fruit farming
fruit industry
fruit production
history
industrial countryside
land development
nonfiction
produce
rural
settling the west
sociology
soil studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780520211728
- Weight: 726g
- Dimensions: 156 x 238mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 1998
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The once arid valleys and isolated coastal plains of California are today the center of fruit production in the United States. Steven Stoll explains how a class of capitalist farmers made California the nation's leading producer of fruit and created the first industrial countryside in America. This brilliant portrayal of California from 1880 to 1930 traces the origins, evolution, and implications of the fruit industry while providing a window through which to view the entire history of California. Stoll shows how California growers assembled chemicals, corporations, and political influence to bring the most perishable products from the most distant state to the great urban markets of North America. But what began as a compromise between a beneficent environment and intensive cultivation ultimately became threatening to the soil and exploitative of the people who worked it. Invoking history, economics, sociology, agriculture, and environmental studies, Stoll traces the often tragic repercussions of fruit farming and shows how central this story is to the development of the industrial countryside in the twentieth century.
Steven Stoll is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University.
