Farm size and work ethic: measuring the success of immigrant farmers on the American grasslands, 1875–1925

With the general increase in the scale of American farming over the last 100 years, farm size has sometimes been used as a measure of financial success. This measure requires considerable modification, particularly when the intensity of farming is introduced. The average size of farms also varied according to government land granting policy, stage of settlement, accessibility to markets, fluctuations in market prices for farm produce and variations in climate which affected harvest yields. In this essay the validity of farm size as a measure of success is considered and then applied to three immigrant groups in central Kansas to determine the importance of the work ethic in their value systems. The Mennonites, not unexpectedly, appear to have been the most successful farmers, but the French-Canadians, contrary to general wisdom, achieved a higher level of success than Swedish immigrant farmers.     

British-Israelists and the “State of Israeli” in the Twentieth Century

British-Israelism was a significant movement in British culture in the twentieth century. At its high-point in the mid-twentieth century, card-carrying members of the British-Israel World Federation numbered in the tens of thousands. Several members of the royal family — including King George VI — publicly declared their adherence to British-Israelist doctrine. They have shared this belief with lawmakers and generals, poets and television personalities. British-Israelists believe that the descendants of the biblical polity of Israel are the Anglo-Saxon people of Britain. As such, the British occupation of Jerusalem in 1917 was seen by British Israelists as an event of incomparable prophetic significance. This article explores the ways in which British-Israelists responded to the changing status of Palestine over the course of the short twentieth century. Drawing on the insights of Zygmunt Bauman and of Andrew Crome, I contend that British-Israelism — at times philo-Semitic, at times anti-Semitic — is fundamentally allosemitic in its attitude towards Israel and the Jews. As such, to paraphrase Crome, British-Israelists can “never interact with Israel on its own terms.”