Todd Dresser

My current research looks at the development of rural sociology from the Progressive Era until the early years of the Cold War. Surprisingly, it finds that the family farm was not a central object of concern for the discipline until the years leading up to World War II. Rather, social scientists at the turn of the twentieth century such as Liberty Hyde Bailey and Charles Galpin worried that "family farm values" such as independence and self-reliance were out dated in an era dominated by trusts, corporations, and other forms of collective enterprise. A second generation breathed new life into these values, however, as they became increasingly eager to distinguish industrial agriculture in the U.S. from that under authoritarian regimes in Europe. As a result, key figures such as Carl Taylor and Carle Zimmerman reversed the stance of a previous generation. They saw the nuclear family farm as a bastion of individualism amid the conformity and creeping totalitarianism of postwar mass society. Between 1890 and 1960, rural sociologists, by and large, went from fearing for the future of individual farms to fearing for the future if the family farm no longer supported individualism.

I graduated with a PhD in history under the supervision of William Cronon from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. Since then I worked at the Univeristy of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Since 2014, I have worked at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay where I wear two hats: one as an Associate Lecturer of History and the second as an instructional technologist, where my job is to strategize UW-Green Bay's online learning mission.