Two related arguments frame this book. Both are provocative and, on the whole, convincing. The first is that historians have failed to see the connections between rural reform in the United States and land reforms in Mexico in the 1930s, an era in which both nations confronted the problem of agrarian inequality, albeit in different ways. The second is that historians, because they have not paid attention to the interactions of Mexican and US rural reformers, have missed the truer origins of the “green revolution” and seen it solely as a product of US Cold War – era imperialism rather than as an outgrowth of earlier attempts to solve the problem of rural poverty within the United States, especially in the US South. According to Olsson, these stories have been lost because of the intellectual traditions that divide the histories of the United States and Mexico (and Latin America generally)...

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