R. Douglas Hurt is professor of history at Purdue University. He is author of Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South; The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century; and The Great Plains during World War II. He is former editor of Agricultural History, former president of the Agricultural History Society, Fellow of the Agricultural History Society, and Affiliate Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska.