"Raises important new questions about the unusual role that yeomen played in the modernization of American agriculture. Strom offers intriguing insights into the problematic nature of technological and scientific change: while such change might 'lift all boats' in the abstract and long term, in the short term many supposed beneficiaries paid a steep price. She does a great job of telling that side of the story and of showing how resistance to new ideas and practices also helps shape their ultimate form and impact."
—Deborah Fitzgerald, author of Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture

Description

This first full-length study of the cattle tick eradication program in the United States offers a new perspective on the fate of the yeomanry in the twentieth-century South during a period when state and federal governments were both increasing and centralizing their authority. As Claire Strom relates the power struggles that complicated efforts to wipe out the Boophilus tick, she explains the motivations and concerns of each group involved, including large- and small-scale cattle farmers, scientists, and officials at all levels of government.

In the remote rural South—such as the piney woods of south Georgia and north Florida—resistance to mandatory treatment of cattle was unusually strong and sometimes violent. Cattle often ranged free, and their owners raised them mostly for local use rather than faraway markets. Cattle farmers in such areas, shows Strom, perceived a double threat in tick eradication mandates. In addition to their added costs, eradication schemes, with their…

More / Hide