E-Books →Agrarian Crossings Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside

Dismantling the artificial boundaries that can divide American and Latin American history, Tore Olsson shows how the agrarian histories of both regions share far more than we realize. He traces the connections between the US South and the plantation zones of Mexico, places that suffered parallel problems of environmental decline, rural poverty, and gross inequities in land tenure. Bringing this tumultuous era vividly to life, he describes how Roosevelt's New Deal drew on Mexican revolutionary agrarianism to shape its program for the rural South. Olsson also looks at how the US South served as the domestic laboratory for the Rockefeller Foundation's "green revolution" in Mexico―which would become the most important Third World development campaign of the twentieth century―and how the Mexican government attempted to replicate the hydraulic development of the Tennessee Valley Authority after World War II.
Rather than a comparative history,
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