Introduction

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          The purpose of this bibliography is to bring together the significant secondary materials relating to the history of the Farmers' Alliance and Populist Party.  Henry Clay Dethloff produced the first edition of this bibliography, which the Agricultural History Center at the University of California, Davis published in June, 1973.  I produced a revised edition, which the Agricultural History Center published in January, 1989.  The first two editions appeared in hard copy.  This third edition appears on this Internet site only in December, 2000.  I eliminated a number of items of a textbook nature for this edition.  In this third edition, I have included multiple listings of entries that lend themselves to such treatment, which was not done for previous editions of this bibliography.  Literature on states with fewer than five entries are listed under the heading, "Other States."   

          Contemporary observations and many primary sources have been excluded, with the exception of select "official" publications and documentaries.  Articles in Arena, Forum, Nation and North American Review for the 1890s, for example, are not included in this list, unless they had particular historiographical importance.  Many county and general state histories provide useful information but are referenced here only if they contain some unusual emphasis on farm movements and agricultural conditions in the late nineteenth century.  Entries appearing in the usual biographical dictionaries and handbooks are not referenced.  America: History and Life and Dissertation Abstracts International may contain more complete annotation about various entries than this bibliography.  

          The chapters, "Agriculture and Agrarianism," "Farmer Organizations," and "Political Movements Related to Populism," are not meant to be exhaustive treatments of these subjects.  I included only the references that seem most important to the study of the Farmers' Alliances and Populist Party.  Likewise, I focused the chapter, "Bibliographies, Historiograhies, Problems Books, and Review Essays," upon the items that seemed most important. 

          I wish to thank the Agricultural History Center at the University of California, Davis for permission to revise and republish this bibliography on the internet.  I also wish to thank Willa Garrett at Southwest Missouri State University's Meyer Library for her help in tracking down citations.  Likewise, I wish to thank my department head, Marc Cooper, for his support, my research assistant, Mathew J. Vaughn, for his invaluable assistance, and Southwest Missouri State University for the sabbatical leave to complete this project.