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{{short description|American historian}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Gilbert Fite
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| burial_coordinates = {{coord|35.2178|-97.446|type:landmark|display=inline}}
| monuments =
| nationality = American
| other_names =
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Fite's ''The Farmers' Frontier, 1865-1900'' focused on the development of the Great Plains region during the latter part of the 19th century. In the work, Fite rebuked the [[environmental determinism]] set up in [[Walter Prescott Webb|Walter Prescott Webb's]] ''The Great Plains'' and instead argued that it was the people- farmers in this instance- that shaped the culture of the [[Great Plains]] environment rather than the other way around. Fite's work was one of the first to bring ideas of historical agency to those who chose to live in the Great Plains while also explaining how agriculture became the dominant economic engine of the region due to decisions made by these early American settlers.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Farmers' Frontier, 1865-1900|last=Fite|first=Gilbert C.|publisher=University of New Mexico|year=1977|location=Albuquerque}}</ref>
The two other influential works of Fite in regard to American agricultural history were ''American Farmers: The New Minority'' and ''Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980.'' Both works focused heavily on how the political and economic power of agricultural peoples shrank in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In the former work, Fite argued that those who made their livelihoods on agriculture held less power at the end of the twentieth century than in the early decades of the century due to increased farm consolidation and greater technological innovations, which put more money into the pockets of a select few who were fortunate or smart enough to keep expanding. Additionally, this new economic environment coupled with political changes and a decline in the cultural myth of [[Agrarianism|Jeffersonian agrarianism]] to shift political attention away from farmers and farming political organizations.<ref>{{Cite book|title=American Farmers: The New Minority|last=Fite|first=Gilbert C.|publisher=Indiana University Press|year=1977|location=Bloomington}}</ref> ''Cotton Fields No More'' continued this sort of analysis, shifting the focus to the southern United States after the Civil War and argued in a similar vein that political and technological changes caused small-scale farmers to leave agriculture. ''Cotton Fields No More'' won the 1985 Theodore Saloutos Award for Best Book in Agricultural History.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980|url=https://archive.org/details/cottonfieldsnomo0000fite|url-access=registration|last=Fite|first=Gilbert C.|publisher=University Press of Kentucky|year=1984|location=Lexington|isbn=9780813103068 }}</ref>{{external media |width=210px |
==Notable works (in chronological order)==
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[[Category:20th-century American historians]]
[[Category:American male non-fiction writers]]
[[Category:Historians of agriculture]]
[[Category:1918 births]]
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