Agrarian Crossings | Tore C. Olsson

Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside

Extended Synopsis

In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. Agrarian Crossings tells the vital story of how these campaigns were conducted in direct dialogue with one another, as reformers in each nation crossed borders to exchange models, plans, and strategies. Dismantling the artificial boundaries that frequently isolate American history from Latin American history, Tore C. Olsson demonstrates how the agrarian histories of both regions share deep, interconnected roots. He traces the complex connections between the American South and the plantation zones of Mexico—two areas that suffered parallel struggles with environmental decline, rural poverty, and gross inequities in land tenure. This text reveals how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal drew directly on Mexican revolutionary agrarianism to shape its programs for the rural South, how the American South served as the domestic laboratory for the Rockefeller Foundation’s subsequent “green revolution” in Mexico, and how the Mexican government attempted to replicate the hydraulic development of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) after World War II. Rather than a standard comparative study, this innovative work maps the cross-border comparisons that directly affected policy, moved populations, and reshaped the physical landscape.

Target Audience & Reading Specialization

Essential reading for academic researchers, historians, and students specialized in transnational history, Latin American studies, and modern American history. Highly valuable for readers focused on environmental history, agricultural economics, the political legacy of the New Deal, and international developmental policy during the twentieth century.

Author Biography

Tore C. Olsson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a dedicated historian whose research focuses on the intersections of agricultural reform, transnational political history, and environmental change across national borders.

Accolades & Awards

• Published by Princeton University Press, a leading academic publisher renowned for rigorous historical scholarship.
• Critically praised as an innovative, boundary-breaking history that introduces a new methodology for examining interconnected policy exchanges between the United States and Mexico.

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