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From Can See to Can't: Texas Cotton Farmers on the Southern Prairies. By Thad Sitton and Dan K. Utley. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. xii, 316 pp. Cloth, $25.00, ISBN 0-29277720-5. Paper, $16.95, IsBN 0-292-77721-3.)
It is common belief among American historians that agriculture became modern by the 1920s-that is, in science, technology, economic organization, and cultural values, farming in the 1920s has more in common with farming today than with that of the 1880s. But for the German, Czech, Anglo, and African American farm families of south-central Texas studied by Thad Sitton and Dan IC Utley, new ways and old ways coexisted. On the one hand, this was "the heyday of Texas cotton agriculture," when livelihoods depended on an unpredictable world market. On the other hand, this was a region still immersed...