Excerpt from Middle Western Agricultural History as a Field of Research As yet there is no comprehensive volume or series of studies on the subject. For general treatments, one must depend on sum maries in the better economic history texts, and whenever there is need of detailed information one is obliged to turn to widely scattered articles, chapters, and monographs which, at best, cover the subject only as a woefully incomplete and ill-fitted patchwork. Although many of these writings hold a high place in American historiography, their usefulness as a contribution to the history of the American basic industry is often vitiated by the fact that they have usually been written as political, social, or diplomatic history. In other words, agriculture and rurality have been reached from the outside rather than used as the starting point. Of the twelve states constituting the Middle West, only Wis consin is provided with a modern history of its agriculture. In this respect, Joseph Schafer's excellent summary may well serve as a model.6 The other volumes of the same author's Domesday Book series and Frederick Merk's Economic History of Wiscon sin during the Civil War Decade also deserve mention because of their contents and the significance of the methods used. E. V. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.