The Look of the Land

History

Hart, John Fraser

Americas

PRENTICE/HALL

The look of the land (Foundations of cultural geography series)

Hart, John Fraser, Land That Feeds Us, The

The Land That Feeds Us (Commonwealth Fund Book Program)

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

Norton

“For the many Americans who have never set foot on a real farm, this book is required reading. . . . An engaging blend of agricultural history, geography, travel, and interviews with farmers [that] provides an unsentimental, realistic look at American farm life.” ―Library Journal American farming has driven American life and fed much of the world for three centuries. Often in the words of farmers themselves, here is the story of what grows where and why, of America’s primary farming regions east of the Rockies. What was it like “Back then” to be a farmer? What of the plight of the family farm, what of government programs? What shape will American farming take in the next century? This is a fully informed survey of our number-one industry by one of America’s premier geographers.

The Land That Feeds Us

W.W.Norton&Company

The Southeastern United States

Van Nostrand

The South (New searchlight series)

Good reading copy. Some wear from normal use and age.

The American farm: How farming shaped the landscape of America

B&N Books

From the acclaimed landscape historian and geographer, a comprehensive handbook to understanding the elements that make up the rural landscape.
Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
In this book, John Fraser Hart offers a comprehensive handbook to understanding the elements that make up the rural landscape―those regions that lie at or beyond the fringes of modern metropolitan life. Though the last two centuries have seen an inversion in the portion of people living on farms to those in cities, the land still beckons, whether traversed in a car or train, scanned from far above, or as the locus of our food supply or leisure. 
The Rural Landscape provides a deceptively simple method for approaching the often complex and variegated shape of the land. Hart divides it into its mineral, vegetable, and animal components and shows how each are interdependent, using examples from across Europe and America. Looking at the land forms of southern England, for instance, he comments on the use of hedgerows to divide fields, the mineral or geomorphological features of the land determining where hedgerows will grow in service of the human animal's needs. Hart reveals the impact on the land of human culture and the basic imperative of making a living as well as the evolution of technical skills toward that end (as seen in the advance of barbed wire as a function of modern transportation).
Hart describes with equal clarity the erosion of land to form river basins and the workings of a coal mine. He charts shifting patterns of crop rotation, from the medieval rota of food (wheat or rye), feed (barley or oats), and fallow (to restore the land) to modern two-crop cycle of corn and soybeans, made possible by fertilizers and pesticides. He comments on traditions of land division (it is almost impossible to find a straight line on a map of Europe) and inventories a variety of farm structures (from hop yards and oast houses to the use of dikes for irrigation). He identifies the relict features of the landscape―from low earthen terraces once used in the southern United States to prevent erosion to old bank buildings that have become taverns and barns turned into human homes. Carrying the story of the rural landscape into our frantic era, he describes the "bow wave"where city life meets rural agriculture and plots the effect of recreation and its structures on the look of the land.

The Rural Landscape

World

Johns Hopkins University Press

In American popular imagination, the mobile home evokes images of cramped interiors, cheap materials, and occupants too poor or unsavory to live anywhere else. Since the 1940s and '50s, however, mobile home manufacturers have improved standards of construction and now present them as an affordable alternative to conventional site-built homes. Today one of every fourteen Americans lives in a mobile home. 
In The Unknown World of the Mobile Home authors John Fraser Hart, Michelle J. Rhodes, and John T. Morgan illuminate the history and culture of these often misunderstood domiciles. They describe early mobile homes, which were trailers designed to be pulled behind automobiles and which were more often than not poorly constructed and unequal to the needs of those who used them. During the 1970s, however, Congress enacted federal standards for the quality and safety of mobile homes, which led to innovation in design and the production of much more attractive and durable models. These models now comply with local building codes and many are designed to look like conventional houses. As a result, one out every five new single-family housing units purchased in the United States is a mobile home, sited everywhere from the conventional trailer park to custom-designed "estates" aimed at young couples and retirees. Despite all these changes in manufacture and design, even the most immobile mobile homes are still sold, financed, regulated, and taxed as vehicles.
With a wealth of detail and illustrations, The Unknown World of the Mobile Home provides readers with an in-depth look into this variation on the American dream.

The Unknown World of the Mobile Home (Creating the North American Landscape)

Engineering & Transportation

Rhodes, Michelle J.

Morgan, John T.

Automotive

Few Americans know much about contemporary farming, which has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. In The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, the award-winning geographer and landscape historian John Fraser Hart describes the transformation of farming from the mid-twentieth century, when small family farms were still viable, to the present, when a farm must sell at least $250,000 of farm products each year to provide an acceptable level of living for a family.The increased scale of agriculture has outmoded the Jeffersonian ideal of small, self-sufficient farms. In the past farmers kept a variety of livestock and grew several crops, but modern family farms have become highly specialized in producing a single type of livestock or one or two crops. As farms have become larger and more specialized, their number has declined. Hart contends that modern family farms need to become integrated into tightly orchestrated food-supply chains in order to thrive, and these complex new organizations of large-scale production require managerial skills of the highest order. According to Hart, this trend is not only inevitable, but it is beneficial, because it produces the food American consumers want to buy at prices they can afford.Although Hart provides the statistics and clear analysis such a study requires, his book focuses on interviews with farmers: those who have shifted from mixed crop-and-livestock farming to cash-grain farming in the Midwest agricultural heartland; beef, dairy, chicken, egg, turkey, and hog producers around the periphery of the heartland; and specialty crop producers on the East and West Coasts. These invaluable case studies bring the reader into direct personal contact with the entrepreneurs who are changing American agriculture. Hart believes that modern large-scale farmers have been criticized unfairly, and The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, the result of decades of research, is his attempt to tell their side of the story.

The Changing Scale of American Agriculture

Business & Money

Economics

University of Virginia Press

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Books by Hart, John Fraser