Everyone was Pounding on Us

This essay analyzes agricultural politics and activism in the United States during the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Although journalists and social scientists studied farm activism at the time, historians have neglected it. As this article demonstrates, however, the farm crisis is valuable for analyzing why ordinary Americans mobilized as citizens and activists in a period of economic dislocation. Informed by the recent "emotional turn" in social movement studies, the essay frames farm organizing as an archetypal example of "front porch politics". Mostly, farmers organized out of a sense of being wronged; the resulting sense of injustice fueled a rural uprising

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Economic history · Front (military · Geography · Injustice · Period (music · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Porch · Social movement · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Organic Food and Agriculture · History · Law