Troubled Fields: Men, Emotions, and the Crisis in American Farming

In Oklahoma in the 1980s and 1990s, suicide -- not accident as previously assumed -- was the leading cause of agricultural fatalities among male farmers. Ramírez-Ferrero suggests that the root causes lie not in purely economic or personal factors but rather in the processes of modernization. Using emotions and gender as modes of analysis, he locates these men's stories in the wider context of American history, agricultural economics and politics, capitalism, and Christianity.