"Challenging traditional scholarship on the New Deal, the book reinterprets the history of rural electrification. It tells the previously unacknowledged story of how private power companies, with allies in land-grant universities, engendered social and technical innovations in the 1920s and early 1930s that enabled growing numbers of farmers to obtain electrical service, well before the creation of Depression-era government programs"--.

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Historical Context of Rural Electrification
  • 1 The Standard Narrative and Its Defects
  • 2 Unattractive Economics in the Rural Electricity Market
  • 3 Business Attitudes toward Farmers in the 1920s
  • 4 The Lure and Lore of Rural Electrification
  • 5 Farmers on Their Own
• Part II: Alignment of Rural Stakeholders
  • 6 Utility Interest in Rural Electrification Awakens
  • 7 The Unexpected Public Relations Value of Rural Electrification
  • 8 The Industry Organizes the CREA
  • 9 State Committees Work to Resolve Uncertainties
  • 10 Regulation and the Extension of Lines to Rural Areas
  • 11 Momentum in the Rural Electrification Subsystem
• Part III: Growth of Rural Electrification Efforts in the 1930s
  • 12 Government Innovations in the Rural Electrification Subsystem
  • 13 Competition and Private Utilities in the REA Era
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D
  • E
  • F
  • G
  • H
  • I
  • J
  • K
  • L
  • M
  • N
  • O
  • P
  • R
  • S
  • T
  • U
  • V
  • W
  • Y
  • Z