Related Guides
Featured Film
- Food forward. Season 1, Episode 13, The U.S. of Agriculture (streaming, Academic Video Online) From the Founding Farmers to the modern Farm Bill, what has 200 years of progress brought to the table? More food at lower prices for sure, but also food fights over the environment, hunger, nutrition, and waste.
Browse Digital Collections
- Organic Roots Collection (National Agricultural LIbrary) The Organic Roots Digital Collection aims to harness the information from our agrarian roots to ensure the sustainability and longevity of today’s small farms. It is an electronic collection of historic USDA documents published before 1942 (before synthetic chemicals became widely used) that contain information and data that is still pertinent for today's agriculture.
- Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (Cornell University) The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) is primarily a collection of landmark agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century. These full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science, forestry, human nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science.
- Making of America (Cornell) The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.
- Seed and Nursery Catalogs (Biodiversity Heritage Library) This collection includes works issued as seed and nursery catalogs, originally published for the purposes of documenting trends, products, and expert advice related to botany, horticulture, and commercial agriculture.
Find Images
- Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives (Library of Congress) The photographs in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944.
- Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs (Library of Congress) Photographers working for the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1944 made approximately 1,600 color photographs that depict life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The pictures focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working.
- Small Agriculture Digital Exhibits (National Agricultural Library) The U.S. Department of Agriculture has supported small-scale farming and niche agricultural initiatives throughout its lifespan. This exhibit showcases three of these initiatives: the school garden, subsistence homesteads, and victory gardens and farms
- USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection (National Agricultural Library) The USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection is one of the most unique collections in the Rare and Special Collections of the National Agricultural Library (NAL). As a historic botanical resource, it documents new fruit and nut varieties, and specimens introduced by USDA plant explorers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection spans the years 1886 to 1942. The majority of the paintings were created between 1894 and 1916. The plant specimens represented by these artworks originated in 29 countries and 51 states and territories in the U.S. There are 7,497 watercolor paintings, 87 line drawings, and 79 wax models created by approximately 21 artists.
- Special Collections (National Agricultural Library) Special Collections houses rare books, manuscript collections, nursery and seed trade catalogs, photographs, and posters from the 1500s to the present. Materials cover a variety of agricultural subjects including horticulture, entomology, poultry sciences, natural history, and are not limited to domestic publications
- Image/Photographic Art (National Agricultural Library) Links to USDA and other websites with food/agriculture images.
Podcasts
- Past & Present Podcasts: Historic Farming Historic farming retains a connection to field and yield that modern farming does not. Farmer Ed Shultz describes the animals and methods he uses at Great Hopes Plantation.
- Cal Ag Roots Cal Ag Roots puts historical roots under current California food and farming change movements by telling the story of California agricultural development in innovative, useful and relevant ways.
- Eat This Podcast: Rethinking the folk history of American agriculture Many of the things you might believe about the history of agriculture in America are not true.
- Eat This Podcast: Early Agriculture in Eastern North America This history of domestication and agriculture encompasses North America too.
- Working History: Southern Small Farmers Standing their Ground Professor Adrienne Petty discusses her book, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War, the black and white farmers in the South who were part of the "small farming class," and their evolving strategies for holding onto their land through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- Flatbush + Main: Land and Labor in Agricultural Brooklyn In Episode 34 of Brooklyn Historical Society’s podcast Flatbush + Main, co-hosts Zaheer Ali and Julie Golia discuss Brooklyn’s long farming history, and the complex interplay of power, land, and labor in Kings County.
