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We study a farmer's decision to convert traditional cropland into land for growing dedicated energy crops, taking into account sunk conversion costs and uncertainties in crop returns. The optimal decision rules differ significantly from the expected net present value rule, which ignores uncertainties, and from real options models that allow only one-way conversion into energy crops. These models also predict drastically different patterns of land conversions into and out of energy crops over time. Using cornsoybean rotation and switchgrass as examples, we show that the model predictions are sensitive to assumptions about stochastic processes of the returns. Government policies might have unintended consequences: subsidizing conversion costs into switchgrass may not much affect proportions of land in switchgrass in the long run.

Three factors help to explain why school enrollments in the Northern United States were higher than those in the South and in most of Europe by 1850. One was affordability: the northern schools had lower direct costs relative to income. The second was the greater autonomy of local governments. The third was the greater diffusion of voting power among the citizenry in much of the North, especially in rural communities. The distribution of local political voice appears to be a robust predictor of tax support and enrollments, both within and between regions. Extra local voice raised tax support without crowding out private support for education.

Building social tables in the tradition of Gregory King, we develop new estimates suggesting that between 1774 and 1800 American incomes fell in real per capita terms. The colonial South was richer than the North at the start, but was already beginning to lose its income lead by 1800. We also find that free American colonists had much more equal incomes than did households in England and Wales. The colonists had greater purchasing power than their English counterparts over all of the income ranks except in the top percent.

This paper examines the spatial relationship among slave prices, escape, and slave owners’ property rights using the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as a natural experiment. The act reinforced slave owners’ property rights, but its effect diminished with distance to the North. Estimates suggest that prices in Northern slave states increased by up to 35 percent relative to Southern states because of the act. The paper’s findings are robust to changes in sample restrictions, spatial composition effects, and placebo tests on the act’s implementation date. The contention that the act had an effect on escape risk is supported by a reduction in rewards offered and the frequency of advertisements for runaways observed in newspaper advertisements from the time.

Talks about the southern exodus and its impact on American life. Between 1900 and the 1970s, twenty million southerners migrated north and west. Weaving together for the first time the histories of black and white migrants, James N. Gregory traces their paths and experiences in a comprehensive new study that demonstrates how this regional diaspora reshaped America by \"\"southernizing\"\" communities and transforming important cultural and political institutions. Challenging the image of the migrants as helpless and poor, Gregory shows how both black and white southerners used their new surroundings to become agents of change. Combining personal stories with cultural, political, and demographic analysis, he argues that the migrants helped create both the modern civil rights movement and modern conservatism. They spurred changes in American religion, notably modern evangelical Protestantism, and in popular culture, including the development of blues, jazz, and country music. In a sweeping account that pioneers new understandings of the impact of mass migrations, Gregory recasts the history of twentieth-century America. He demonstrates that the southern diaspora was crucial to transformations in the relationship between American regions, in the politics of race and class, and in the roles of religion, the media, and culture.

The United States was an overwhelmingly rural society before the Civil War and for some time afterward. There were cities and factories, of course, especially in the northern seaboard states. In 1860, Manhattan's population was nearing a million. Brooklyn, which had been farmland at the time of the American Revolution, was itself home to 250,000. New England's mill towns were already well known, and Chicago's growth elicited awe. But these were exceptions. In the same year, 80% of Americans lived in rural places of 2,500 inhabitants or less. While 59% of the labor force worked in agriculture, only 15% worked in manufacturing. As the newspaperman Jesse Buel put it at the time, agriculture remained the great business of civilized life. In this sweeping look at rural society from the American Revolution to the Civil War, Ariel Ron argues that agricultural history is absolutely central to understanding the nation's formative period. Upending the myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South, Grassroots Leviathan traces the rise of a powerful agricultural reform movement spurred by northern farmers. Showing that farming dominated the lives of the majority of Americans, in the North and the South, through almost the entire nineteenth century, Ron traces how middle-class farmers in the Greater Northeast built a movement of semi-public agricultural societies, fairs, and periodicals that, together, fundamentally recast the relationship of rural people to market forces and governing structures. By the 1850s, Ron writes, this massive movement boasted over a thousand organizations and the influence to have Congress publish annual agricultural reports in editions that rivaled sales of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the era's runaway bestseller. As northern farmers became increasingly organized, they pressed new demands on the federal government that inevitably challenged the entrenched prerogatives of southern slaveholders. Ideologically and organizationally, agricultural reform conditioned the emergence of the Republican Party and the North's break with the slaveholding republic. The movement culminated in the creation of the US Department of Agriculture and the land-grant university system. These agencies reconfigured the nature and purpose of the American state at the same time as they came to revolutionize farming in the United States and the world over. Looking at farmers as serious independent agents in the making, unmaking, and remaking of the American republic, Grassroots Leviathan offers an original take on the causes of the Civil War, the rise of federal power, and American economic ascent during the nineteenth century.

Past studies have dismissed the claim that retail enterprise among blacks in the urban North during the early 20 th century was suppressed by competition from white immigrant merchants. The present investigation reconsiders the suppression hypothesis, applying the concepts of \"niche overlap\" and \"competitive exclusion\" from the literature on ethnic competition. An analysis of Census data on large northern cities offers some support for the hypothesis. The level of retail entrepreneurship of black men was negatively associated with that of white immigrant men in 1910 and 1920, implying that black retail enterprise at these time-points was discouraged by the presence of white immigrant merchants. These negative associations, though, were only moderately significant in a substantive sense, and there was no evidence that a reduction of white immigrant merchants would have produced substantial gains for blacks in the retail trade, as many black entrepreneurs and activists at the time had claimed.

Cultures vary tremendously in how they understand violence. We discuss white southern and northern culture in the United States to illustrate the different meanings cultures ascribe to violence and honor. We argue that (1) Southerners understand the meaning of insults differently than Northerners do. (2) They have behavioral rituals that make allowances for this understanding. And (3) they live within social structures and systems that perpetuate these “culture‐of‐honor” meanings and ideologies. Laboratory experiments, field experiments, surveys, analyses of laws, and records of homicide rates are reviewed. Also, we discuss the legacy of slavery, which legitimized forms of coercive and punitive violence over and above violence legitimized by a culture of honor. Southern violence cannot be understood simply as deviance and lawlessness. Rather, it is a product of a coherent meaning system defining the self, honor, rituals for conflict, and tools that may be used when order is disrupted.