Bill Caraher |

If you leave me alone in the NDQ archives, there’s no telling what’s going to happen.

On a lark, I decided to check out the 1973 volume of NDQ (41.3 for those of you with a scorecard). Coincidentally, I’ve been wading my way through Robert McAlmon’s 1924 novel, Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period (Contact 1924). You can read about some other coincidences that this book invoked here, if you want.

This probably predisposed me to notice a poem by Garland Strother titled “In Small Towns in North Dakota” which preceded an essay by none other than Gilbert Fite: “Western Farmers and the Decline of Laissez Faire, 1870-1900.“

For those of you not in the know, Fite is widely considered the father of American agricultural history. He taught for over 25 years at the University of Oklahoma before leaving to serve as president of the Eastern Illinois University from 1971-1976. In 1976 he returned to the classroom as a professor of history at the University of Georgia.

Fite has an interesting connection not only to our region, but also to UND. He did his undergraduate work and his MA at the University of South Dakota before moving on to study with Elmer Ellis at the University of Missouri. Here’s a nice treatment of Fite’s career and influence. Ellis was born in Anamoose, North Dakota before going to UND for his BA and his MA. Ellis ultimately received his PhD at the university of Iowa. Fite studied with Ellis and coincidently Fite served on the dissertation committee of Gordon Iseminger, a former colleague of mine in UND’s history department. Some things, it would appear, are destined to come full circle.

If you feel like you want to explore NDQ more, check out some of the content from issue 90.1/2, our digital archive  and the digital anthology of the first 90 volumes of the journal: NDQ@90 .

We would also love it for more of you to subscribe to NDQ. The only way that venerable journals like ours stay alive is through subscriptions and submissions. We’re currently accepting fiction and non-fiction submissions.

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Bill Caraher is the editor of NDQ.

41.3