Written as a contribution to the Social Science Agricultural Agenda Project, this essay in historical interpretation assumes that the main contribution that historians can make to the planning process is to describe and explain how the situation facing the planners came to be. Organized around three concepts—Jeffersonian or democratic agrarianism, the Great American Agricultural Revolution, and the farm crisis of the 1980s, the main implication of the paper may be that Jeffersonianism, once so filled with promise, now gets in the (...) way of realistic thinking about farming and rural life. To implement agrarian values in existing circumstances, we would need to do more than end the crisis. We would need to move back against the revolution. (shrink)