William Thomas Okie
Biographic Data
| ID | 4225253 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William Thomas Okie |
| GIVEN NAMES | William Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Okie |
| SIGNATURE | OKIE W T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Kennesaw State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2925-4787 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Writing in Place
This special issue introduction argues for the value of place-based approaches to the past for agricultural and rural historians. It does so in three dimensions: concept, method, and narrative. Conceptually, place takes shape in tension with space, environment, and landscape. Like landscape, place allows historians to weave together nature, the built environment, and the cultural meanings people have ascribed to both over time, but in ways that p…
The parable of the railway agent
This essay examines the abbreviated fiction-writing career of an unlikely author, Central of Georgia Railway agricultural agent Jesse Frisbie Jackson. In the process, the essay explores the centrality of storytelling to the early twentieth-century United States, to farming and agricultural reform, and to the historical profession
Magic Bean
A “Soybean Fractionation Flow Chart” from 1949, found in the early pages of Matthew Roth's Magic Bean, provides a good illustration of the promise and the challenges of writing such a history: soybeans become flakes, then crude oil and meal, which, on their way to becoming edible oils or livestock feed also find their way into such commodities as plywood adhesives, paper coatings, soap stock, sex hormones, alternative meat loaf, and shortening (p…
Beauty and Habitation
Fredrika Bremer (1801–65) was a Swedish novelist and reformer primarily known for her role in advocating for women’s voting and property rights in Sweden. This article analyzes her 1849–51 journey through North America and argues that she was also an important environmental figure who deserves renewed attention from environmental historians because of her embodied approach to environmental aesthetics, or what I call “aesthetic habitation.” More b…
Georgia Peach
The Georgia Peach
Imprinted on license plates, plastered on billboards, stamped on the tail side of the state quarter, and inscribed on the state map, the peach is easily Georgia's most visible symbol. Yet Prunus persica itself is surprisingly rare in Georgia, and it has never been central to the southern agricultural economy. Why, then, have southerners - and Georgians in particular - clung to the fruit? The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in…
The American Yawp
Historians have been urging each other to ditch their textbooks for the last several years. (See, for example, Lendol Calder, “Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey,” Journal of American History, March 2006, pp. 1358–70.) Textbooks are often boring, written by committee, unable to render the arguments that make history something more than “what happened.” Textbooks are also expensive, especially as students graduate with …
Under the Trees
The Georgia peach boom around the turn of the twentieth century was often hailed as a successful experiment in diversification. Peach growers, the story went, threw off the tyranny of King Cotton by pledging their allegiance to the "Queen of Fruits." This portrayal is partly true; unlike other proposed alternatives to cotton, peaches flourished in many places. But the history of the "labor problem" in the Georgia peach belt makes it clear that pe…
Under the Trees
The Georgia peach boom around the turn of the twentieth century was often hailed as a successful experiment in diversification. Peach growers, the story went, threw off the tyranny of King Cotton by pledging their allegiance to the "Queen of Fruits." This portrayal is partly true; unlike other proposed alternatives to cotton, peaches flourished in many places. But the history of the "labor problem" in the Georgia peach belt makes it clear that pe…
Beauty and Habitation
Fredrika Bremer (1801–65) was a Swedish novelist and reformer primarily known for her role in advocating for women’s voting and property rights in Sweden. This article analyzes her 1849–51 journey through North America and argues that she was also an important environmental figure who deserves renewed attention from environmental historians because of her embodied approach to environmental aesthetics, or what I call “aesthetic habitation.” More b…
Under the Trees
The Georgia peach boom around the turn of the twentieth century was often hailed as a successful experiment in diversification. Peach growers, the story went, threw off the tyranny of King Cotton by pledging their allegiance to the "Queen of Fruits." This portrayal is partly true; unlike other proposed alternatives to cotton, peaches flourished in many places. But the history of the "labor problem" in the Georgia peach belt makes it clear that pe…
The Georgia Peach
Imprinted on license plates, plastered on billboards, stamped on the tail side of the state quarter, and inscribed on the state map, the peach is easily Georgia's most visible symbol. Yet Prunus persica itself is surprisingly rare in Georgia, and it has never been central to the southern agricultural economy. Why, then, have southerners - and Georgians in particular - clung to the fruit? The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in…
The American Yawp
Historians have been urging each other to ditch their textbooks for the last several years. (See, for example, Lendol Calder, “Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey,” Journal of American History, March 2006, pp. 1358–70.) Textbooks are often boring, written by committee, unable to render the arguments that make history something more than “what happened.” Textbooks are also expensive, especially as students graduate with …
Georgia Peach
Beauty and Habitation
Fredrika Bremer (1801–65) was a Swedish novelist and reformer primarily known for her role in advocating for women’s voting and property rights in Sweden. This article analyzes her 1849–51 journey through North America and argues that she was also an important environmental figure who deserves renewed attention from environmental historians because of her embodied approach to environmental aesthetics, or what I call “aesthetic habitation.” More b…
The parable of the railway agent
This essay examines the abbreviated fiction-writing career of an unlikely author, Central of Georgia Railway agricultural agent Jesse Frisbie Jackson. In the process, the essay explores the centrality of storytelling to the early twentieth-century United States, to farming and agricultural reform, and to the historical profession
Magic Bean
A “Soybean Fractionation Flow Chart” from 1949, found in the early pages of Matthew Roth's Magic Bean, provides a good illustration of the promise and the challenges of writing such a history: soybeans become flakes, then crude oil and meal, which, on their way to becoming edible oils or livestock feed also find their way into such commodities as plywood adhesives, paper coatings, soap stock, sex hormones, alternative meat loaf, and shortening (p…
Writing in Place
This special issue introduction argues for the value of place-based approaches to the past for agricultural and rural historians. It does so in three dimensions: concept, method, and narrative. Conceptually, place takes shape in tension with space, environment, and landscape. Like landscape, place allows historians to weave together nature, the built environment, and the cultural meanings people have ascribed to both over time, but in ways that p…
Economic history (5 works) · History (4 works) · History (4 works) · Archaeology (3 works) · Art (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Political science (3 works) · Sociology (3 works) · Agriculture (2 works) · American Environmental and Regional History (2 works)