Tore C. Olsson's Agrarian Crossings exemplifies how history can give new meaning to the past by looking at the landscape of history from a different perspective. Olsson retraces the evolution of agrarian policies pursued in the United States and Mexico between the early 1930s and the Cold War's beginning. The 1930s and 1940s saw the emergence in both countries of radical approaches to their agrarian strains. In the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected on a platform that promised to address the 1929 economic crisis through state intervention, launched a campaign to revitalize southern agricultural production while relieving the social and economic conditions of local sharecroppers. In Mexico, President Lázaro Cárdenas reignited radical agrarianism, which brought expropriations of large landholdings and redistribution of 50 million acres of land, a vast majority among poor farmers who worked in communal parcels (ejidos)....
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1 February 2019
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