The Fruited Plain

Some consider American agriculture as one of the wonders of the modern world. In this book Walter Ebeling tells its story. Professor Ebeling grew up on a farm, loves the soil, and had the good fortune to have been closely associated with the land in all its aspects. Beginning with a brief history of why and how preagricultural peoples changed from hunters and gatherers and eventually became tillers of the soil, Professor Ebeling then deals with the seven geographic regions of the United States--from the East to California--giving the history and present status of agriculture for each reason. Although the main thrust of The Fruited Plain is the drama, romance, and excitement of the American agricultural experience, Professor Ebeling is concerned with the environmental, ecological, and sociological aspects of agriculture and its supporting industries. He discusses environmental problems in America that began when the Indians' "shifting" agriculture (allowing for long periods of soil restoration) was replaced by the white man's permanent agriculture. He examines the modern technology for a successful and environmentally viable permanent agriculture and how it can be implemente on a much larger scale. The questions asked--and answered--are what are the principal environmental problems? What is being, and/or can be done about soil erosion? Scarcity of water? Urban encroachment on agricultural lands? What directions can be taken by benevolent technology? Does technology have remedies for land that is susceptible to water erosion and loss of topsoil? Likewise, pollution and environmental degradation resulting from excessive use of pesticides? Our society much recognize the importance of protecting our agricultural resources, and Professor Ebeling, in this monumental book, gives many suggestions on how to accomplish the sustained utilization of America's great resource--the farmlands. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

The beleaguered Joad family of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath struggled in an era of disappointed dreams and empty pockets. But how might the grandchildren of that Dust Bowl generation fare in today’s more promising times? In this boisterously inventive book Alvin Kernan sends various descendants of the original Joad family on a postmodern journey out of California and into the excesses of American culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The experiences of today’s Joads are as hilarious as they are discomfiting: they encounter in Kernan’s America a world of democracy gone haywire and social institutions in perplexing disarray. In ten satiric episodes, Kernan visits virtually every important American institution—the family, education, religion, art, the military, law courts, sex, science and medicine, politics, and not least television and its advertisements. Unsparing with his barbs, he reveals both the fools and the knaves among us. Kernan’s modern-day Joads find themselves in a distorted world where a surplus of democracy not only fails to free its inhabitants but also makes them vulnerable to the machinations of greedy and unscrupulous exploiters. Echoing the voices of such other provocative wits as Evelyn Waugh and Tom Wolfe, Kernan will make you laugh at the absurdity of American culture and—in all likelihood—at yourself.

Agriculture in the United States has changed dramatically in the last two hundred years. Economic transformation marked by the expansion of the industrial economy and big business has contributed to an increase in industrial food production. Amid this change, policymakers and cultural critics have debated the best way to produce food and wealth for an expanding population with imperialistic tendencies. In a sweeping overview, Beyond the Fruited Plain traces the connections between nineteenth-century literature, agriculture, and U.S. territorial and economic expansion. Bringing together theories of globalization and ecocriticism, Kathryn Cornell Dolan offers new readings on the texts of such literary figures as Herman Melville, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as they examine conflicts of food, labor, class, race, gender, and time—issues still influencing U.S. food politics today. Beyond the Fruited Plain shows how these authors use their literature to imagine agricultural alternatives to national practices and in so doing prefigure twenty-first-century concerns about globalization, resource depletion, food security, and the relation of industrial agriculture to pollution, disease, and climate change.

"Across the Fruited Plain" by Florence Crannell Means. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

In December 1980, Donald Steele departed from Anabel Island, leaving behind his pregnant wife and a deferred legacy. A single planted seed was the only sign he had been there at all. In September 1981, he returned for the birth of his twin sons, Luke and Anthony. The seed he had planted had now grown, branching in two directions. In September 1986, he departed again, this time leaving far more than one seed planted in the ground. In the interceding years, Anabel Island experienced a power struggle borne of a change in family dynamics. It existed under the shadow of a mysterious man, Donald's proxy and collaborator. And through it all, Luke and Anthony came of age in an idyll all their own. Above the Fruited Plain is the first volume of a four-part series that tracks the lives of Luke and Anthony Steele from conception to age 18. This novel contains the prologue and first two books of the saga.

Wall Street and the Fruited Plain delves deep into the parody known today as the "Gilded Age". The last decades of the 19th century saw both industrial and agricultural explosions in the United States. However, the base metal beneath this glittering façade was comprised of sweat-soaked, underpaid laborers, many of whom had just splashed ashore from Europe's seething cauldrons. In the early years of the period, the nation underwent the wrenching challenge of Reconstruction, nominally resolved in the compromise of 1877. In the Gilded Age, America expanded both internally and externally. The frontier moved from Kansas to California. Trappers, miners, cattlemen, and--finally-homesteaders, with the help of a burgeoning railroad network, fanned out across the central plains and the western plateaus. Wall Street dominated not only the economic and social life of the country, but the politics as well. A series of lackluster presidents between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt facilitated this dominion and by the end of Roosevelt's first Administration, America had become an adolescent headliner on the world stage.