Peasants and Farmers

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• Questions
• Summary

1. At the time that common fields were being enclosed in England at the end of the eighteenth century, settled agriculture had not developed on any extensive scale in the USA. Forests covered over 800 million acres and grasslands 600 million acres.
2. Most of the landscape was not under the control of white Americans.
3. Till the 1780s, white American settlements were confined to a small narrow strip of coastal land in the east.
4. If you travelled through the country at that time you would have met various Native American groups.
5. Several of them were nomadic, some were settled. Many of them lived only by hunting, gathering and fishing; others cultivated corn, beans, tobacco and pumpkin.

1. The expansion of wheat agriculture in the Great Plains created problems.
2. zealous farmers had recklessly uprooted all vegetation, and tractors had turned the soil over, and broken the sod into dust.
3. In the 1930s, terrifying dust storms began to blow over the southern plains. Black blizzards rolled in, very often 7,000 to 8,000 feet high, rising like monstrous waves of muddy water.
4. They came day after day, year after year, through the 1930s.
5. These killed cattle and destroyed land. Farmers had cleared the land of grass which rendered large areas of land coverless and dry.

New technology was introduced which aimed at increasing production. Tractors, disk ploughs, mechanical reapers, combine harvesters, etc., began to be
used.

Thomas Jefferson became President of the USA in 1800, over 700,000 white settlers had moved on to the
Appalachian plateau through the passes.

In the decades after 1800, the US government committed itself to a policy of driving the American Indians westward, first beyond the river Mississippi, and then further west.

1. From the late nineteenth century, there was a dramatic expansion of wheat production in the USA.
2. In 1910, about 45 million acres of land in the USA was under wheat.
3. The urban population in the USA was growing and the export market was becoming ever bigger.
4. As the demand increased, wheat prices rose, encouraging farmers to produce wheat.
5. The spread of the railways made it easy to transport the grain from the wheat-growing regions to the eastern coast for export.

The machines spelt misery for the poor farmers. Many bought machines on loan which they could not pay later. Jobs were difficult to find. Production expanded and soon there was surplus. Wheat prices fell and export markets were adversely affected. The Great American Depression ruined the farmers in the 1930s.