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"In this study of the interaction between agricultural mechanization and rural culture, J. Sanford Rikoon focuses his analysis on grain threshing patterns in the Midwest from its early nineteenth-century beginnings--manual flailing and animal treading--to the adoption of the combined harvester-thresher between 1925 and 1945. The "golden age of threshing" began in the late nineteenth century, when steam engines and threshing machines became familiar sights on the rural harvest landscape. Rikoon considers the succession of threshing systems in terms of the relations between specific technologies, occupational practices, and the social organization of work"--Book jacket.