Popular Culture / Agriculture / Photography
Purebred and Homegrown
America’s County Fairs
Drake Hokanson and Carol Kratz
Terrace Books,
A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
Get a corn dog and meet me at the harness races!
Visit America’s county fairs as they are vividly evoked through the images, stories, and voices of the people who make them happen—4-H kids, fair managers, pie judges, farmers and ranchers, rodeo queens, entertainers, food vendors, midway pitchmen, and assorted local characters. Illustrated throughout with stunning color photographs, Purebred and Homegrown is an affectionate and thoughtful look at the history of county fairs and their tradition and persistence today, despite the diminished number of Americans who earn their living from agriculture.
Author-photographers Drake Hokanson and Carol Kratz traveled 40,000 miles across America from Maine to Alaska, from Georgia to California, visiting ninety county fairs in thirty-five states. By day they interviewed, observed, and photographed; at night they camped among the carnies and the teens showing sheep, under the roller coaster, and next to the chicken barn. The story they tell goes beyond the stereotype of fairs as quaint anachronisms obsessed with giant pumpkins and instead reveals the county fair as an important institution that helped define us as a nation of free-thinking, self-reliant, community-focused people. They present the nearly 200-year-old county fair as a fountainhead of American ideals and rural life, as a place of reunion, and as perhaps the most traditional of all American celebrations.
“It’s dark now, but the glare of the fair blots out any stars. Bare yellow bulbs sway in the night breeze; judges bend, intent on contestants’ breads, embroidered aprons, cucumbers, country crafts, blurry snapshots of the barn cat. All across the grounds are sad tattoos and hopeful faces, chance reunions; a 4-H chicken dinner in your stomach, cow pie on your shoe, the taste of dust, the squall of animals, farm kids and town kids, summer night air with a breath of endless possibility, of endless summer; everywhere rich icons of old rural ways, of country life; a sense of pride for the neglected agricultural center of things, a firm hold on tradition, a sense of what’s best about us all, and a sense of coming change: the county fair.” —excerpt from Purebred and Homegrown
“Just like a great county fair, this book is vast and overpowering. . . . To read Purebred and Homegrown: America’s County Fairs is to smell hot corn dogs and barbecue and to hear the happy screams of kids on roller coasters and the moo of fat oxen in harness.”—Jane Stern and Michael Stern, authors of Two for the Road: Our Love Affair with American Food
Drake Hokanson is the author of the popular book Lincoln Highway: Main Street across America. He is the director of the Center for Mississippi River Studies at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota. Carol Kratz is a physician assistant at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin. They are co-editors of America from the Air: An Aviator’s Story and live in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
For more information regarding publicity and reviews contact Chris Caldwell, our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu
more optional information
October 2008
LC: 2008011963 S
264 pp. 9 x 10
116 color and b/w illus.
ISBN 978-0-299-22820-0 Jacketed cloth $50.00 s
ISBN 978-0-299-22824-8
Paper $29.95 t
Accumulate titles in the Shopping Cart by clicking on the bulleted lines below. You can submit your order electronically, paying for it with MasterCard or Visa.
Click here for further explanation of shopping cart feature.
Never ordered from us before?
Read this first.
Home | Books | Journals | Events | Textbooks | Authors | Related | Search | Order | Contact If you have trouble accessing any page in this web site, contact Kirt Murray, Web manager. E-mail: kdmurray@wisc.edu or by phone at 608-263-0733.
Updated April 16, 2009© 2008, The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
