bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Rural Banks and Czech Nationalism in Bohemia, 1848–1914
Authors: Albrecht Catherine 
Published: March 2022

AbstractRural credit in the Bohemian crown lands of the Habsburg monarchy became available on a wide scale only after the abolition of serfdom in 1848. Although organized to serve municipal interests, savings banks and Schulze-Delitzsch credit cooperatives initially provided rural credit, primarily in the form of mortgage loans. Such local financial institutions embraced a social mission of aiding the poor and promoting small producers, while seeking to encourage economic modernization and Czech national revival. Strengthening the economic position of small agricultural producers fit in with both the socioeconomic and national motives of local financial institutions in the 1860s and 1870s. With the agricultural depression of the 1880s, however, agrarian leaders criticized credit cooperatives and savings banks for promoting urban interests over those of their rural customers, and new financial institutions, particularly Raiffeisen-type cooperatives, were founded in the 1890s and 1900s to better meet the credit needs of small farmers. These new cooperatives contributed to the growing political and economic integration of the peasantry into the Czech national life.
Forging His Own Path: William Jasper Spillman and Progressive Era Breeding and Genetics
Authors: Carlson Laurie 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
William Jasper Spillman (1863-1931) developed wheat hybrids at Washington State Agricultural College in 1899 and was the first to explain Mendelian theories to an agricultural audience. He moved to the USDA in Washington, DC, where he pioneered the field of farm management and helped establish cooperative programs that evolved into the Agricultural Extension Service. Spillman, an iconoclast of sorts, straddled the rural world of empirical thinking as well as the world of professional science. He remained linked to his Missouri roots by participating in the National Grange his entire adult life, while he also was a member of the American Academy of Science and received an honorary doctorate for his pioneering work in genetics. The plant genetics work he participated in was largely responsible for agricultural over-production and ultimately the depopulation of rural America by the 1930s. He sought to resolve the situation with his plans for a national agricultural allotment program, which eventually became the foundation for federal farm programs. His books, "The Law of Diminishing Returns (1924)" and "Balancing the Farm Output: A Statement of the Present Deplorable Conditions of Farming, its Causes and Suggested Remedies (1927)", helped shape agricultural policies for decades.
A World without Chocolate: Grocery Purchases at Some Upper Canadian Country Stores, 1808-1861
Authors: McCalla Douglas 
Published: March 2022

AbstractBased on account books, a frequently overlooked type of source, this is a study of grocery purchases made by sample customers from some country stores in Upper Canada (Ontario), in selected years between 1808 and 1861. Although literary sources suggest otherwise, no one bought chocolate; but many people bought tea, tobacco, sugar, and salt, evidently at standard levels for contemporary British society. As time went by, a growing range of products appear among purchases, notably many drugs and medications. The evidence is also read for indications of what families made for themselves. Their choices, visible in everyday routine purchases, have implications for some of the main stories about material life, consumption, and market relationships in early settlement society. It is difficult, for example, to picture rural isolation from a capitalist world if ordinary farm families regularly purchased goods imported from the far side of the globe.
“Quite an Experiment”: A Mining Company’s Attempt to Promote Agriculture on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, 1895–1915
Authors: Reynolds Terry S. 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
Between 1895 and 1915 Cleveland-Cliffs, one of America’s leading iron mining companies, became deeply involved in promoting agricultural development on Michigan’s rugged Upper Peninsula. Its two-decade-long attempt to identify appropriate plants and farming practices and thus to extend the agricultural frontier into this region was ambitious. It included an experimental garden, a greenhouse and nursery, an attempt to produce fertilizer locally, two major experimental/demonstration farms, and a number of other agricultural initiatives not usually associated with mining companies. This article reviews why Cleveland-Cliffs became deeply involved in promoting agriculture, the nature of its programs, why its activities were more comprehensive and longer lasting that those of most other companies (mostly timber and railroad) who attempted to promote agriculture in the Great Lakes cutover region, and why the attempt ultimately failed.
Furniture Exempt from Seizure: African-American Farm Families and Their Property in Texas, 1880s–1930s
Authors: Reid Debra A. 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
The real and personal property that African-American farm families accumulated between the 1880s and the 1930s can tell a lot about the political consciousness of the disfranchised at the height of African-American landownership. Farm women and their families invested their limited financial and labor resources into household equipment and furnishings, knick-knacks and personal adornment, land, and homes. They used the legal system to secure their property and convey it to heirs even as unscrupulous landlords conspired against them. But purchasing land could limit a family’s mobility, disrupt kinship networks, and constrain their ability to purchase other products of the modern consumer age, most notably automobiles. Irrefutably, the white middle class defined consumer culture and the characteristics of modernization in the rural South, not the black farm families, but rural African Americans still had to feed, clothe, and house their families. Their choices became the object of analysis and ridicule by reformers during the early twentieth century. By the 1930s the small homes that once housed aspiring families became the symbols of poverty even as rural reformers and the Progressive farmers they served celebrated a rural aesthetic that advocated recycling and thrifty management.
“Mightier than Missiles”: The Rhetoric of Civil Defense for Rural American Families, 1950–1970
Authors: Barker-Devine Jenny 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
During the Cold War, physical and cultural distance from major metropolitan areas did not preclude farm and rural families from taking part in civil defense preparations. In the early 1950s the evacuation of civilian populations from urban areas and military targets served as the basis for federal and state civil defense programs. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, as the dangers of fallout shaped the public discourse, rural areas were no longer considered safe from an attack. Throughout this period, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), in conjunction with the USDA and State Cooperative Extension Services, launched campaigns to educate farmers on their roles as providers of food and as budding atomic scientists. The rhetoric of these programs reinforced the notion that rural Americans contributed not only food and raw materials to the American economy, but also served as the moral backbone of a democratic nation. Such language placed farmers and rural residents on the front lines of the Cold War.
Consumer Choice, Agency, and New Directions in Rural History
Authors: Blanke David 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
According to critics, history resides at an intellectual crossroads. They charge that scholars rely too heavily on ill-defined concepts-like agency-and under-appreciate the determination force of the capitalist consumer economy. This essay appraises the key themes, methods, questions, and conclusions contained within recent US history. While consumer agency looms large in many works, consumer studies also explore the influence of structural economics, material goods, and institutions that shaped consumer behavior. Moreover, distinct periodization is important in recognizing and understanding the shifting contours of American consumption. This article appraises how recent scholarship in rural consumer culture relates to these broad categories and what this reveals about rural history in general. In the end, this paper probes the central challenge posed to historians by the notions of consumer choice and agency.
Beyond the Monolith of Modernity: New Trends in Immigrant and Ethnic Rural History
Authors: Loewen Royden 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
This article suggests that the idea of "modernization," the uni-linear transition from peasantry to commercial agriculture, has shaped much of the writing of rural immigrant communities during the twentieth century. It also suggests that the history of immigrant and ethnic farm communities has begun to take a different tack during the last decade. This change reflects trends in the broader historiography of settlement society, including a shift from social history to cultural history. Modernity is no longer seen as an unrelenting force, natural and dominant in character. Rather postmodernity’s concern with fragmentation and asymmetry, and the linguistic turn with its fixation on cultural invention and created mythology, seemed evident. Regional, national, and international-based studies alike reflect this new research agenda, and this article highlights seven books in particular. Three, focusing on settler society and rural culture in regional, national, and transnational variations, describe modernity in particular; they see the very idea of change, once seen as inevitable and inexorable, as constructed, invented, and contrived. Three others are local studies of specific ethnic rural groups in which the immigrant or ethnic farm community stands at a cross current to a commercializing countryside, contesting and subverting the very intentions of the agents of the market economy and state interests. The final book is the author’s own recent work in comparative history, Diaspora in the Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities and Mid-Twentieth Century Rural Disjuncture. The two central words "diaspora" and "disjuncture" suggests that these communities, one located in Canada and the other in the United States, responded to economic changes through a diversity of lifeworlds, including farm commercialization, urbanization, and a conservative recreation of an old order agraria. These Mennonites created a set of contradictory mythologies and master narratives that sought to bring teleological sense, social order, and meaning to inchoate and fragmented cultures. The seven books thus acknowledge quotidian complexity, ethnic variation, and national and regional difference. They are representative of what appears to be a wider trend in the academy of North American rural history.
The Proliferation of Agricultural Schools: A Practical Education in Greece (1922–1932)
Authors: Kritikos George 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
This study analyzes the proliferation of agricultural schools in Greece from 1922 to 1932 from a social, economic, and cultural perspective. It examines the role of the Greek vernacular language—demotic—and vernacular education as tools for national and social integration. It investigates the links between the establishment of agricultural schools, the teaching of demotic in elementary school, and the integration in the labor market not only of thousands of unemployed Greek citizens, but also of approximately 1.2 million Asia Minor refugees who fled to Greece after 1922. The article examines whether limiting the Greek vernacular language to primary schools, with the continuation of both the dominant classical model of education and the use of "purist" (katharevousa) Greek in secondary education, created the prerequisites for upward mobility through education or reproduced the existing social and financial inequalities in Greek society.
The Far-from-Dry Debates: Dry Farming on the Canadian Prairies and the American Great Plains
Authors: Russell Peter A. 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
The absence of dry farming techniques is the key element that many Canadian scholars use to explain the decade of delay in the agricultural development of the prairie region after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. They have assumed that American farmers had developed an unproblematic set of techniques, the presence of which was essential before large-scale European settlement of the Prairies could begin. American historians of Great Plains agriculture present a far different picture of those American farmers. Dry farming in the United States did not designate an agreed-upon set of techniques, but a lively field of debate that remained unresolved for decades. Summer fallow comprised the essential practice on the driest Canadian Prairies for the conservation of moisture. Americans neither pioneered nor promoted it first; summer fallow only became general practice on the northern Great Plains after Canadian farmers had demonstrated how it could be practicably done. The flow of this agricultural innovation turns out to have been the opposite of what most Canadian scholars had assumed.
St. Louis and the Sharecroppers: Urban Connections to a Rural Protest
Authors: Stepenoff Bonnie 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
Scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the Sharecroppers’ Roadside Demonstration by evicted farmworkers, who camped out along rural highways in Missouri’s southeastern Bootheel in January 1939. This article differs from previous works by focusing on Fannie Cook and Marcus "Al" Murphy and their interactions with the sharecroppers. Cook, an affluent Jewish woman, and Murphy, an African-American member of the Communist Party, both participated in the St. Louis Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Sharecroppers. After state officials removed the demonstrators from the highways, Cook traveled to the Bootheel to observe conditions there and wrote a novel about what she saw. She also helped support the Sharecroppers’ Camp, or Cropperville, a privately funded refuge for displaced farmworkers. Murphy came to St. Louis in the mid-1930s to teach farmworkers how to organize. When the demonstrators went out onto the roadsides, he worked with labor organizations to collect and deliver supplies. Ultimately, the connections between these urban supporters and rural protesters were personal, not ideological, reminding us that history is not about abstractions, but people.
Thomas Minor’s World: Agrarian Life in Seventeenth-Century New England
Authors: Anderson Virginia Dejohn 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
For over thirty years (1653-1685), Thomas Minor kept a diary recording his activities as a farmer in Stonington, Connecticut. This article uses Minor’s diary, the only extant document of its kind for the seventeenth century, to reconstruct key features of the colonial New England agrarian experience. Arguing that work played as significant a role as religion in shaping early New Englanders’ lives, the article examines not only how farming contributed to the Minors’ economic prosperity and independence, but also how its physical demands and seasonal rhythms shaped Thomas Minor’s world-view more generally. Agriculture provided an important context for Minor’s relations with his wife and sons, with nature, and even with a sense of his own mortality. Minor emerges as someone less interested in calculating profit and loss on his farm than in accomplishing a hard day’s work as a steward of the land that he hoped would support his family for generations to come.
"Agricultural Statecraft" in the Cold War: A Case Study of Poland and the West from 1945 to 1957
Authors: Spaulding Robert Mark 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
This paper examines how the rise and fall of Polish agriculture affected the larger political and economic relationships among Poland and three key members of the western alliance--the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Federal Republic of Germany--in the first decade of the Cold War. This period is revealing precisely because the reversal of fortunes in the Polish agricultural economy required the Polish government and some western counterparts to maneuver through periods of both agricultural advantage and disadvantage. Agricultural strategies as means and ends motivated the Polish, British, West German, and American governments to actions that bent, stretched, and limited some well-established practices in Cold War relations across divided Europe. By explicating the political consequences of changing flows of agricultural exports and imports in one specific context, this essay serves as case study of the role of agriculture in the global context of the Cold War.
Breaking Sod or Breaking Even? Flax on the Northern Great Plains and Prairies, 1889–1930
Authors: MACFADYEN JOSHUA D. 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
A new thirst for paint and color in cities made extensive flax production profitable in the northern Great Plains and Prairies and contributed to the cultivation of the most fragile grassland ecosystems. The production of flax seed for linseed oil became an early spin-off of the Prairie wheat economy but, unlike wheat, flax vanished from old land after one or two rotations and reappeared in districts with the most new breaking. Officials explained the migrant crop as preparing native grasslands for cultivation or exhausting soil in old land, but farmers brought flax to their new breaking for other reasons. Producers would only put flax on any land when a range of economic and environmental conditions were in place. It was never sown without promise of adequately high prices or in the absence of affordable seed and other inputs. When price allowed, it usually appeared on new breaking because it could be planted later and transported further without upsetting the balance of other activities and without farmers learning many new techniques. Scientists discovered that diseased soil drove flax off old land, not soil exhaustion. Circumventing the disease was possible but costly, and farmers simply replaced flax with the next most lucrative commodity.
Telling Stories: Keeping Secrets
Authors: JENSEN JOAN M. 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
This article addresses the reticence of some farm women to share their experiences with historians and how that desire to keep secrets collides with the desire by scholars to tell the stories of these women. It argues that scholars must continue to struggle with the issue of which stories to tell publicly and which to keep private. The author discusses her own experience telling stories about rural women in the 1970s and the need to give voice to the heritage of rural women, especially of groups that have feared revealing their experiences. She offers examples of historians of rural women who have successfully worked with formerly silenced populations and urges historians to continue to tell stories about these lives, to reevaluate what has been already learned, to ask new questions, and to discuss which secrets need to be shared.
"So Long as I Can Read": Farm Women’s Reading Experiences in Depression-Era South Dakota
Authors: LINDELL LISA R. 
Published: March 2022

Abstract
During the Great Depression, with conditions grim, entertainment scarce, and educational opportunities limited, many South Dakota farm women relied on reading to fill emotional, social, and informational needs. To read to any degree, these rural women had to overcome multiple obstacles. Extensive reading (whether books, farm journals, or newspapers) was limited to those who had access to publications and could make time to read. The South Dakota Free Library Commission was valuable in circulating reading materials to the state’s rural population. In the 1930s the commission collaborated with the USDA ’ s Extension Service in a popular reading project geared toward South Dakota farm women. This "Reading in the Home" program greatly increased reading opportunities and motivations. Of particular interest to rural women were tales of pioneer life featuring strong protagonists.Through these stories, farm women found validation and encouragement to persevere. Reading also broadened horizons and challenged assumptions. For the depression-era farm woman, reading books and other materials provided recreation, instruction, and inspiration in a discouraging time.
102 Association of Medicaid Expansion Under the Affordable Care Act with Access to Elective Spine Surgical Care
Authors: Greenberg Jacob K. , Brown Derek , Olsen Margaret , Ray Zack 
Published: March 2022

INTRODUCTION:
The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid eligibility in many states, improving access to some forms of elective healthcare in the United States. Whether this effort increased access to elective spine surgical care is unknown.

METHODS:
We evaluated elective spine surgeries using state inpatient databases from 2011-2016 from 10 states that did and four states that did not expand Medicaid access in 2014. Patients aged 18-64 years undergoing elective spine surgery were included. We used a quasi-experimental difference-in-difference design to evaluate the impact of Medicaid expansion on hospital procedure volume and payer mix, independent of any time-dependent trends. Subgroup analyses were conducted that stratified results by cervical fusion, thoracolumbar fusion, and non-instrumented surgery.

RESULTS:
We identified 218,648 surgeries in 10 Medicaid expansion states and 118,693 in 4 non-expansion states. Expansion states showed an increase in overall and Medicaid but not privately insured volumes in 2014, compared to decreased or steady volumes in non-expansion states.These changes led to a 17% (95% CI 2%-35%) increase in mean hospital spine surgical volume, and a 23% (95% CI -0.3%-52%) increase in Medicaid volume associated with Medicaid expansion. Privately insured surgical volumes did not change significantly. The rise in Medicaid volumes led to a shift in payer mix, with the proportion of Medicaid patients rising by 6.1 percentage points (95% CI 4.0-8.1), and the proportion of private payers decreasing by 6.9 percentage points (95% CI 4.7-9.1). While the magnitude of the effects varied, these trends were similar across procedure subgroups.

CONCLUSION:
Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act was associated with an economically and statistically significant increase in spine surgery volume and the proportion of patients with Medicaid insurance.