Peter A. Coclanis is the Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and the director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of numerous works in U.S. and international economic history, including The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (1989); with David L. Carlton, The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (2003); and Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Globalization in Southeast Asia over la Longue Durée (2006).; and with Sven Beckert, Barbara Hahn, and Richard Follett, Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities (2016).
The lecture traces the key role that agriculture has played in America's development, and lays out the key features that have informed U.S. agriculture over the centuries.