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Q. What drew you to agricultural history?
A. As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley during the early 1960s, virtually all of my professors were urbanites from the East Coast. Berkeley had a college of agriculture, but the American historians in the history department were, with a couple exceptions, oriented toward the East and the city. I had no courses that considered agriculture or rural life. Such fields as African-American history, women's history, and environmental history did not exist. We studied slavery, but we learned little about the cultivation of cotton-or any other crop, for that matter. In the preface to my book From the Family Farm to Agribusiness, an institutional history of irrigation in California from 1850 to the 1930s, I wrote: "At the University of California, Berkeley, rural America seemed faintly absurd and always anachronistic. The nation's hinterland, I discovered, was saturated with religious fundamentalism and intolerance, plagued by dreary isolation, oppressive conventionality, and homogenized values, infected with a virulent strain of antiintellectualism. The 'sturdy yeoman farmer' competed for historical attention with an amazing assortment of hicks and rubes. Agricultural history was not for me."
Don't get me wrong! My professors at Berkeley included Charles Sellers, Kenneth Stampp, Lawrence Levine, Robert Middlekauff, Martin Malia, and other superb historians who gave me plenty to think about. And some of them, particularly Stampp and Sellers, were master lecturers. After a stint in the US Army, I returned to Berkeley for my MA work. As an undergraduate, I had been so impressed with Bob Middlekauff-a historian of colonial America-that I decided to specialize in that field. But the environmental movement had begun, and I became familiar with Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, Garret Hardin, and others.
As my interests shifted to what would become environmental history, UC Davis seemed the ideal place for PhD work because its faculty included the legendary W. Turrentine (Turpie) Jackson, a specialist in the American West who became my mentor; Jim Shideler, who edited Agricultural History and taught courses in twentieth-century America as well as agricultural history; and Donald C. Swain, a pioneer environmental historian who wrote about the conservation movement and the national parks. All three were wonderful role models as well as excellent historians. Turpie was a...