sarahtaber OP , 2 days ago

Here's a 3-for-1 starter! A lot of old money families came out of upstate New York's Hudson Valley- including the Roosevelts.

Why? Feudalism was low-key alive & well there into the 1850s!

sarahtaber OP , 2 days ago

And it's all thanks to Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton put his legal skills to work writing farm lease contracts that trapped wealthy landowning families' workers as tenants forever- while technically avoiding anti-feudalism laws passed in 1787.

https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2023/05/new-yorks-anti-rent-wars-the-end-of-the-patroonships/

sarahtaber OP , 2 days ago

Why'd he do it?

He married into one of those big wealthy land-owning families that kept serfs. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

sarahtaber OP , 2 days ago

We all know Jimmy Carter farmed peanuts.

But for centuries, the South was a "King Cotton" monoculture. Peanuts weren't a "real" crop. They were seen as low-class junk food from enslaved & tenant workers' personal food plots.

How did peanuts go from that to an economic tentpole?

sarahtaber OP , 2 days ago

The boll weevil! It showed up in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

It destroyed cotton crops so hard, even the cotton planters admitted they had to try something else.

https://lions-talk-science.org/2023/03/29/how-weevil-our-crops-recover-the-history-of-how-alabama-farmers-went-peanuts-over-an-invasive-pest/

sarahtaber OP , 2 days ago

Time for a quick dinner break! Will be back in a minute!

sarahtaber OP , 2 days ago

A lot of US presidents have hailed from a rural background. It's usually the "country estate" kind of rural though.

Abraham Lincoln was the first US president who was the "does manual labor" kind of rural. Many of America's leading families were scandalized!