GSF Professor Gabe Rosenberg wins the Wayne D. Rasmussen Award
GSF Professor Gabe Rosenberg has won the Wayne D. Rasmussen Award for his article "No Scrubs: Livestock Breeding, Eugenics, and the State in the Early 20th Century United States," Journal of American History 107.2 (September 2020). The award is given annually by the Agricultural History Society and recognizes the best article on agricultural history published in any journal other than Agricultural History.
No Scrubs: Livestock Breeding, Eugenics, and the State in the Early 20th Century United States
On June 27, 1925, the citizens of Markle, Indiana, put a bull on trial for crimes against the herd. Approximately 1,200 spectators from Huntington, Uniondale, and the surrounding countryside flooded into Markle for the trial. F. H. Bowers, a local attorney, promised the bull a robust defense, but the jury convicted. Judge Abram Simmons handed down a sentence of death, and, with that, the bull was summarily executed. The funeral oration delivered by a local minister is unrecorded, but the content most likely followed a script furnished for the occasion by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The minister would have reminded the assembled audience of the bull's grievous crime, inseparable from the bull's inferior body and tainted blood. “Let us bury him so deep and seal his tomb so tight that both he and his posterity will be lost to this world forever,” implored the USDA's funeral oration.1
Complete article in The Journal of American History.