A Respectable Ditch

A Respectable Ditch
Author: James Thomas Angus
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 478
Release: 1988
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780773518216

The Trent-Severn Waterway took almost ninety years to build, cost over $24 million, and contains some remarkable engineering feats -as well as a few spectacular mistakes. The passage of the first boat through the waterway in July 1920 marked the realizati

Farm

Farm
Author: Joyce Kinkead
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2020-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1607329883

In Farm, Joyce Kinkead, Evelyn Funda, and Lynne S. McNeill explore the culture of agriculture through a diverse and multicultural collection of fiction, poetry, essays, art, recipes, and folklore. This reader views farming through a variety of lenses, asking students to consider what farms, farming, and farmers mean, and have meant, to culture in the United States. In the text, readers are guided through the Jeffersonian idealism of the yeoman farmer (“cultivators of the earth are the chosen people of God”) to literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Thoreau’s “The Bean-Field,” Cather’s prairie trilogy, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Carpenter’s Farm City). Contributors provide historical context for the literary texts, such as discussion of sharecropping vs. plantation systems, the rise of agribusiness and chemical farming, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission. Written, visual, and oral texts ask readers to consider the farm in art (Grant Wood), ecology (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), children’s and young adult literature (classic children’s books, YA novels, nonfiction, and poetry), advertising (from early boosterism to Chipotle videos), print culture (farmers’ market and victory garden posters from both world wars), folklore (food culture, vintners, and veterinarian practices), popular culture (Farm Aid concerts), and much more. Each reading is supported by activities, exercises, projects, and visual rhetorical elements that further connect students to agriculture and the essential work of farmers.