Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-292).

The Farmers' Alliance in Wise County, from its introduction in 1880 to its demise in 1897, endeavored to improve the mental, moral, social, and financial conditions of small agrarians in the north central Texas county. This paper details the Alliance's efforts, in cooperative ventures and political activism and third-party politics, to place farmers in a better economic position. Additionally, the paper focuses on the Alliance's attempts to provide educational and social opportunities and moral guidance to the membership. Source materials include government documents and publications, contemporary accounts, the county Alliance's official newspaper, area newspapers, and the original minutes of the county Alliance from 1893 to 1897.

This paper discusses the influence of religious aspects in rural thought and how they played in the activities of agrarian movements and farm protest movements. The religious orientations of major agrarian reformers in Texas is discussed, as well as the similarities between Protestant religious institutions and agrarian institutions, specifically the Farmers' Alliance and People's Party of Texas.

The Farmers’ Alliance in Western North Carolina receives only cursory analysis in studies concerned with the late nineteenth-century agrarian reform movement in the state. Historians have uniformly labeled the mountain region as inconsequential on the twin basis of geographic isolation and Republicanism. Their analyses have concluded that the Alliance did not matter to Western North Carolinians and that the mountains did not matter to the state Alliance. These assumptions are incorrect. An in-depth examination of the Alliance’s role in WNC demonstrates that the order most certainly mattered to these mountaineers, and their leaders, such as Senator Zebulon Vance, exerted considerable influence upon state and national agrarian reform agendas. Moreover, Western North Carolina agricultural conditions directly impacted farmer’s receptiveness to the Alliance and later Populist movements. This manuscript demonstrates the evolution of the Farmers’ Alliance in WNC using research collected from numerous documents, newspapers, census records, and secondary sources.

With the rising tensions and strains created by modern America, historians have sought diligently to discover the answers to industrial America's problems. One answer lay in American reform movements, and as the New Deal reforms came under fierce attack in the 1950's, liberal historians sought diligently to give to reform movements historical authenticity.