<span>did not improve economic growth.</span>
At the end of the 19th century, about a third of Americans worked in agriculture, compared to only about four percent today. After the Civil War, drought, plagues of grasshoppers, boll weevils, rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer. In the South, one third of all landholdings were operated by tenants. Approximately 75 percent of African American farmers and 25 percent of white farmers tilled land owned by someone else.
Every year, the prices farmers received for their crops seemed to fall. Corn fell from 41 cents a bushel in 1874 to 30 cents by 1897. Farmers made less money planting 24 million acres of cotton in 1894 than they did planting 9 million acres in 1873. Facing high interests rates of upwards of 10 percent a year, many farmers found it impossible to pay off their debts. Farmers who could afford to mechanize their operations and purchase additional land could successfully compete, but smaller, more poorly financed farmers, working on small plots marginal land, struggled to survive.
Many farmers blamed railroad owners, grain elevator operators, land monopolists, commodity futures dealers, mortgage companies, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of farm equipment for their plight. Many attributed their problems to discriminatory railroad rates, monopoly prices charged for farm machinery and fertilizer, an oppressively high tariff, an unfair tax structure, an inflexible banking system, political corruption, corporations that bought up huge tracks of land. They considered themselves to be subservient to the industrial Northeast, where three-quarters of the nation's industry was located. They criticized a deflationary monetary policy based on the gold standard that benefited bankers and other creditors.
All of these problems were compounded by the fact that increasing productivity in agriculture led to price declines. In the 1870s, 190 million new acres were put under cultivation. By 1880, settlement was moving into the semi-arid plains. At the same time, transportation improvements meant that American farmers faced competitors from Egypt to Australia in the struggle for markets.
The first major rural protest was the Patrons of Husbandry, which was founded in 1867 and had 1.5 million members by 1875. Known as the Granger Movement, these embattled farmers formed buying and selling cooperatives and demanded state regulation of railroad rates and grain elevator fees.
Early in the 1870s the Greenback Party agitated for the issue of paper money, not backed by gold or silver, with the idea that a depreciating currency would make it easier for debtors to meet their obligations.
Another wave of protest grew out of the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union (the Southern Farmers Alliance) formed in Lampedusa County, Texas in 1875, and the Northwestern Farmers' Alliance, founded in Chicago in 1880. By the late 1880s, the cooperative business enterprises set up by the Farmers' Alliances had begun to fail due to inadequate capitalization and mismanagement. By 1890, the Farmers Alliances had begun to enter politics. In 1892 the Alliance formed the Peoples' or Populist Party. Among other things, the Populists financed commodity credit system that would have allowed farmers to store their crop in a federal warehouse to await favorable market prices and meanwhile borrow up to 80 percent of the current market price.
Between the 1100s and 1300s, the Church dominated every aspect of human life in Europe. In medieval European culture, the major influence of the Church impacted on the areas of art, architecture, music, literature, philosophy, and intellectual life, among others.
The most advanced techniques in art and architecture were completely at the service of the Church since this institution used to hire the most prominent artisans and artist to create artworks devoted to religious themes. Sacred Christian architecture could be seen in the big churches and cathedrals that dominated the largest European cities, as a hallmark of the Church's dominion in the urban centers. At this particular period, the architectonic styles that excel are late Romanesque and, overall, Gothic, the latter being born in the 12th century and covering to the 15th century.
The music as well was greatly influenced by liturgical music and religious themes. The greatest production in literature and philosophy were, mostly, confined to the work of the monasteries, which were centers not only of praying but also of learning, studying and preserving knowledge. Other learning institutions that counted with the favor of the Church were universities, where students and professors held the legal status of clerics. and therefore a very high status in European medieval society. Poetry and literature at this time mixed Christian topics with courtier stories, like "Perceval, The story of the Grail" by Chretien de Troyes.
In Philosophy, the rediscovery and study of Aristotle's works took place and, thanks to this, the intellectual school of scholasticism took strength and was widespread. This method encourages rationalism, investigation, and empiricism and many monasteries and universities held monks and intellectuals of this school. It paved the way for what centuries later would be the Renaissance.
A Great part of the European culture of this time was enriched by the contact with Arabs, Muslims and Middle Eastern cultures in general due to the Crusades (1095-1291), encouraged by the Church to take the Holy Land. This permitted not only to rediscover Aristotle in Arab works but also to discover new spices, scientific knowledge, and useful technological inventions.
However, the Church also had a strong control of European culture during this time, many works and thoughts that were not aligned with the Chuch's ideology were considered heretic and strongly condemned.
