front cover of The Land Was Theirs
The Land Was Theirs
Jewish Farmers in the Garden State
Gertrude W. Dubrovsky
University of Alabama Press, 1992

Provides a perspective on the pressures, problems, and satisfactions of rural Jewish life as experienced in one community

The Land Was Theirs is about Farmingdale, New Jersey, a community of Jewish farming communities in the United States established with the help of the Jewish Agricultural Society. The 50 year history of Farmingdale provides a perspective on the pressures, problems, and satisfactions of rural Jewish life as experienced in one community.

Beginning in 1919, the community grew around the small town of Farmingdale, when two Jewish families pooled their resources to establish a farm. The community evolved gradually as unrelated individuals with no previous farm experience settled and then created the institutions and organizations they needed to sustain their Jewish life. By 1945 Farmingdale was one of the leading egg-producing communities in the United States, and contributed in large measure to New Jersey’s reputation as the “egg basket of America.”

The Land Was Theirs draws from life-history interviews with 120 farmers, from the author’s personal experiences, and from a variety of private and community papers and documents. They are the pieces from which a full picture of a single Jewish farm community emerges.

[more]

front cover of Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast
Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast
Colonial Encounters in the Fraser Valley
Jeff Oliver
University of Arizona Press, 2010
The Fraser Valley in British Columbia has been viewed historically as a typical setting of Indigenous-white interaction. Jeff Oliver now reexamines the social history of this region from pre-contact to the violent upheavals of nineteenth and early twentieth century colonialism to argue that the dominant discourses of progress and colonialism often mask the real social and physical process of change that occurred here—change that can be more meaningfully tied to transformations in the land.

The Fraser Valley has long been a scene of natural resource appropriation—furs and fish, timber and agriculture—with settlement patterns and land claims centering on the use of these materials. Oliver demonstrates how social change and cultural understanding are tied to the way that people use and remake the landscape. Drawing on ethnographic texts, archaeological evidence, cartography, and historical writing, he has created a deep history of the valley that enables us to view how human entanglements with landscape were creative of a variety of contentious issues. By capturing the multiple dynamics that were operating in the past, Oliver shows us not only how landscape transformations were implicated in constructing different perceptions of place but also how such changes influenced peoples’ understanding of history and identity.

This groundbreaking work examines engagement between people and the environment across a variety of themes, from aboriginal appropriation of nature to colonists’ reworking of physical and conceptual geographies, demonstrating the consequences of these interactions as they permeated various social and cultural spheres. It offers a new lens for viewing a region as it provides fresh insight into such topics as landscape change, perceptions of place, and Indigenous-white relations.
[more]

front cover of Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontiers
Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontiers
Fort Napier and the British Imperial Garrison
Graham Dominy
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Small and isolated in the Colony of Natal, Fort Napier was long treated like a temporary outpost of the expanding British Empire. Yet British troops manned this South African garrison for over seventy years. Tasked with protecting colonists, the fort became even more significant as an influence on, and reference point for, settler society. Graham Dominy's Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontier reveals the unexamined but pivotal role of Fort Napier in the peacetime public dramas of the colony. Its triumphalist colonial-themed pageantry belied colonists's worries about their own vulnerability. As Dominy shows, the cultural, political, and economic methods used by the garrison compensated for this perceived weakness. Settler elites married their daughters to soldiers to create and preserve an English-speaking oligarchy. At the same time, garrison troops formed the backbone of a consumer market that allowed colonists to form banking and property interests that consolidated their control.
[more]

front cover of Littlefield Lands
Littlefield Lands
Colonization on the Texas Plains, 1912–1920
By David B. Gracy II
University of Texas Press, 1968

The phenomenon of colonization by big land companies, common throughout the history of the United States, came late to the Panhandle-Plains of West Texas. Ranchers held sway there up into the 20th century. Then, realizing that the future followed the plow, they, joined by business owners and speculators, founded towns on their land, competed for railroad connections, provided irrigation wells and other improvements, and engaged in a variety of advertising activities to interest prospective settlers and to sell the land to farmers at a profit. Trainloads of such "prospectors" were brought in to tour the land; and salesmen of all kinds roamed all the more settled states painting enticing pictures of the fertile lands which their employers offered for sale.

Major George W. Littlefield created the Littlefield Lands Company and founded the town of Littlefield, Texas, in 1912, in order to sell as farmland a part of his Yellow House Ranch. His sales manager, Arthur P. Duggan (his nephew by marriage, and grandfather of the author of this study), used many of the techniques then current to attract buyers for the Lamb County land in and around Littlefield. He dug wells and operated a demonstration farm; he planted trees, planned a park, and otherwise beautified the town; he helped to create and maintain a school, a bank, and a number of businesses; and he negotiated contracts and coordinated the activities of innumerable independent land agents.

Because the role of the big land company in the settlement of the United States has not, on the whole, received the attention which it deserves, this detailed examination of the operations of one such company is of particular significance. Most of the book is devoted to the creation of the company, the steps taken to make the area attractive to potential settlers, and the problems which beset the building of the community. One chapter discusses the techniques and the difficulties of selling land through independent agents. The final chapter considers the people who moved onto the Littlefield tracts—where they came from, why they came, what their reactions were to the plains country, and how they learned to cope with their new environment. An appendix gives pertinent information about all land transactions conducted by the company between 1912 and 1920, and about each buyer.

For this study the author made use of previously unknown records discovered while he was gathering information for a biography of Major Littlefield.

[more]

front cover of Living in the Stone Age
Living in the Stone Age
Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy
Danilyn Rutherford
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In 1961, John F. Kennedy referred to the Papuans as “living, as it were, in the Stone Age.” For the most part, politicians and scholars have since learned not to call people “primitive,” but when it comes to the Papuans, the Stone-Age stain persists and for decades has been used to justify denying their basic rights. Why has this fantasy held such a tight grip on the imagination of journalists, policy-makers, and the public at large?
 
Living in the Stone Age answers this question by following the adventures of officials sent to the New Guinea highlands in the 1930s to establish a foothold for Dutch colonialism.  These officials became deeply dependent on the good graces of their would-be Papuan subjects, who were their hosts, guides, and, in some cases, friends. Danilyn Rutherford shows how, to preserve their sense of racial superiority, these officials imagined that they were traveling in the Stone Age—a parallel reality where their own impotence was a reasonable response to otherworldly conditions rather than a sign of ignorance or weakness. Thus, Rutherford shows, was born a colonialist ideology.
 
Living in the Stone Age is a call to write the history of colonialism differently, as a tale of weakness not strength. It will change the way readers think about cultural contact, colonial fantasies of domination, and the role of anthropology in the postcolonial world.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter