2. Significance of the Materials


 History celebrates
 the battlefields whereon we meet our death,
 but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive.
 It knows the names of the king's bastards
 but cannot tell us the origin of wheat.
 This is the way of human folly.
 --J.H. Fabre


One cannot fully understand U.S. history without studying its agriculture and its rural communities.
Agriculture fueled the economic engine which built our nation; state and local governments evolved to
regulate farming, land tenure, and trade in agricultural commodities; the farm family was the
fundamental social unit of American life; and agriculture has transformed, for better or worse, our
landscape. Much of what defines the national character of Americans, our cultural values and mores, is
rooted in our agrarian past. Due to its centrality to the American experience, social, economic, and
cultural historians, as well as historians of science and technology, are fascinated by the published record
of agriculture and rural life.

The story of American agriculture is captured in a broad band of documentary resources ranging from
the memoirs and transactions of early agriculture societies; to newspapers and almanacs; family,
community, and corporate archives; and state and county extension service publications. The evolution
of farm and rural life and agricultural economy is chronicled in the agriculture periodical press and the
numerous local, regional, and national farm journals that exhorted, informed, and shaped the opinions,
values, and concerns of early farm families. Journals such as Country Gentleman, Cappers' Farmer, and
Cincinnatus (the latter "devoted to scientific agriculture, horticulture, education, and improvement of rural
taste") have much to tell historians about the daily activities, issues, and practices of the time.

The literature of agriculture and rural life is threatened by the slow, but inexorable deterioration of
books, documents, and photographs, and other paper artifacts in libraries and archives across the country.
The condition of these materials--particularly those created after 1840 on ephemeral, acidic paper--
threatens access to these research resources now and in the future. In addition, the historical literature of
agriculture and rural life typically lacks intellectual access in an on-line bibliographic environment,
limiting the ability of the humanities researcher and scholar to identify and locate resources in order to
trace the history of agriculture and its impact on society as it moved west across the continent. The shear
bulk of the material and its varied locations demands an approach that selects the most important material
for immediate preservation while it identifies the universe of materials at risk.

As rural life changed, so did the content of the literature aimed at the farm family. These materials form
a premier scholarly resource to document the experience of the individual farm family, the establishment
and evolution of farm communities, the pressures affecting rural culture, and how rural culture shifted
and evolved in response to national and world events. Supplementing the published literature are the
diaries, letters, photographs, and farm records that are critical resources to understand rural life and its
role and place in American society.

Agriculture was the predominant social and economic structure of the United States until well into the
19th century. In 1800, over 95% of the nation's five million people were involved in agriculture. By
1870, the population had grown to about 40 million, of whom 90% were engaged in agriculture. On the
eve of the industrial revolution it took four persons engaged in farming to allow one to engage in non-
agricultural pursuits, whereas now one worker in agriculture can sustain fifty or more in other jobs. Prior
to World War II, the basic unit of agriculture and of American society was the family farm. Powerful
forces such as the abolition of slavery, westward migration, the system of share-cropping, the emergence
of state and federal agricultural agencies, the introduction of immigrant populations to rural society, and