Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (America in the World)

Agrarian Crossings not only helps to reconceptualize the history of the American South, U.S.-Mexican relations, and the rise of development; it also stands out for the richness and texture of its empirical analysis."--Kiran Klaus Patel, author of The New Deal: A Global History"A persuasive fusion of intellectual, political, and agrarian history. This impressive and scrupulously researched book is required reading for historians of agriculture, technocratic interchange, and the invention of development in the Americas, as well as for anyone interested in the surprisingly entangled origins of the green revolution."--Chris Boyer, University of Illinois at Chicago"New Dealers in Coahuila, the campesinos of North CarolinaOlsson scrambles familiar geographies in this mind-wrenching account of rural politics in Mexico and the U.

Tore C. Olsson is assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Agrarian Crossings tells the story of how these campaigns were conducted in dialogue with one another as reformers in each nation came to exchange models, plans, and strategies with their equivalents across the border.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. In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and