From Prairie To Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century

Beginning in 1820, settlers broke the tall grass prairies of mid-America. By the 1870s they had begun to use the term "Corn Belt" to describe much of the region. In From Prairie to Corn Belt, Allan G. Bogue chronicles this remarkable transformation and challenges the view that the post–Civil War period constituted thirty years of unrelieved agricultural depression. His book remains the only study of Midwestern agricultural development that focuses on the farmers themselves, the entire range of production problems they had to solve on their land, and the diversity of their responses.