introduction:

Are you interested in the intersections of radical politics, agrarianism, and rural history? Are you active in alternative agriculture, in working for peasants' rights, food sovereignty, permaculture, or other similar areas of practice, and would like to know more about the historical backgrounds of these sorts of things? Then join me in this once a month online reading group, which will cover pretty much anything we decide to cover- I'm not an expert in agrarian or rural history, though I've dabbled in it from the side of Ottoman early modern history; my own interest stems from a life-long attention to peasant struggles and rural activism, as well as current practical work in organic growing and local food systems building, among other things.

The books I've listed below are not exhaustive, but reflect my own particular interests and happenstance finds as of late- other suggestions are more than welcome, and if we can drum up enough participation we could try and carve out some sequential themes (say, rural indigenous struggles in Latin America, the history of alternative agriculture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, etc). I'd like for this group to have a practical aspect besides just reading and discussing history: lessons we can learn in contemporary struggles and practices, ways we can connect agrarian, rural, etc movements and organizations globally, and ways we can shape agricultural and other practices based on knowledge of past peoples and struggles. In part because of my own personal interests but also because I think we can get some good theoretical grounding I'd also really like to look at literature on the origins of agriculture and the so-called rise of the state, taking us back to the Neolithic and analogous periods elsewhere. 

Meetings will be held via Zoom, and if there is interest in it we can set up a Slack workspace for discussion and resource sharing. If you'd like to join, contact me via Twitter (@mar_musa) or email (jallen22@umd.edu), and I'll add you to the list, with a goal of starting up in tandem with the start of the academic year, precise times and dates to be determined collectively.

a tentative bibliography:

Bissett, Jim. Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

Carriker, Robert M. Urban Farming in the West: A New Deal Experiment in Subsistence Homesteads. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010.

Dove, Michael. The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. 

Holt-gimenez, Eric. Campesino A Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture. Oakland, Calif. : New York: Food First Books, 2006.

Kreiner, Jamie. Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 

Manget, Luke. Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2022. 

Scott, James C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 

White, Monica M. (Monica Marie), and LaDonna Redmond. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Davis, Ellen F. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Cambridge ; Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Fitzmaurice, Connor J., and Brian J. Gareau. Organic Futures: Struggling for Sustainability on the Small Farm. Yale: Yale University Press, 2016. 

Gratien, Chris. The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.

about the organizer:

My name is Jonathan Parkes Allen, and I am, among other things, a historian of early modern Islamicate societies, currently working as part of the Open Islamicate Text Initiative; I am also very involved in small-scale agriculture, cultivating and managing about an acre of land on the side of Missionary Ridge south of Chattanooga. I am of central Mississippi origin; my great-grandmother was a sharecropper who picked massive amounts of cotton, only much later in life coming to own her own house and land, which she cultivated and gardened with incredible care and devotion. I suppose my interest in and commitment to peasant, agrarian, and alternative agricultural causes and practices stems from that heritage.