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| A Prairie Populist: The Memoirs of Luna Kellie
ISBN: 9781587291654
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Iowa Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Kellie Luna; Politicians -- Nebraska -- Biography; Populism -- Nebraska; Nebraska -- Politics and government;
Populist singer, Mid-Roader, editor, publisher, wife, mother of eleven, Luna Kellie was a well-informed, fervent member of the Farmers' Alliance movement in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Radicalized by railroad monopolies, corrupt government, recurring drought, heavy mortgages, and a desperate combination of rising costs and falling returns, prairie farmers were turning their energy toward raising "less corn and more hell."
Kellie actively sought to organize Nebraska into cooperatives and educate rural people about land, transportation, and money reform. Her compelling, often heartbreaking memoirs--written on the backs of ornate red-and-gold Farmers' Alliance certificates in 1925--give us her own description of how she became motivated to join the Alliance and participate in the Populist party. Kellie writes of her homesteading and political life from the age of eighteen to forty, of failed crops, mortgaged fields, intense hardships, and her devastation at the death of her children. One of the most complete accounts of the Mid-Road political faction available, relevant in many ways to the plight of today's farmers, A Prairie Populist should be read by anyone with an interest in national politics, the farm protest movement, women's studies, and American cultural history.
Jane Taylor Nelsen received her undergraduate degree in American studies from the University of Iowa. She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in social work and social welfare at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. |
