Rebecca Sharpless is a professor of history at Texas Christian University. She is the author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South; and Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South.
Description
List of Illustrations Prologue: "Definitive Excellence" Introduction: Soil and People 1. "Our Prairie Flour": Colonization, 1840-1861 2. "The Granary of the Confederate States": Civil War, 1861-1865 3. From Prairie to Production: Growing Wheat, 1865-1900 4. Oxen to Electricity: Milling, 1865-1900 5. From Biscuits to Angel Food Cake: Baking, 1865-1900 6. Wheat in the Spring and Cotton in the Fall: Growing, 1900-1940 7. Mechanization, Marketing, and Music: Milling, 1900-1940 8. Homemade Sweets and Standardized Bread: Baking, 1900-1940 9. Fading Glory, Waning Memory: 1940-1972 Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
People of the Wheat is the rare agricultural history that is hard to put down. We meet farmers, mill workers, bakers, and entrepreneurs whose lives were bound up in Texas wheat from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, and through them come to understand how the rise and fall of one crop shaped a region. This engaging, well-written book is for Texans curious about the silos in their backyard, students of agricultural and food history, and anyone who loves rich stories of people, soil, industry, and white bread.--James C. Giesen, Mississippi State University, author of Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South Rebecca Sharpless has provided us with a fascinating book about a Texas most people did not know existed. People of the Wheat is economic history, but it is also technological, social, and gender history. She tells us about the sowing, harvesting, grinding, and baking, but also the culture that grew and prospered because of North Texas's investment in wheat. Sharpless has beautifully captured the stories of the many peoples that created and developed the wheat culture of north Texas.--Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Iowa State University, When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s