Further Reading
Amato, Joseph.When Father and Son Conspire: A Min-
nesota Farm Murder. Ames: Iowa State University
Press, 1988. History of one family’s farm foreclo-
sure and the murder it inspired.
Bonanno, Alessandro, et al., eds.From Columbus to
ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994. Study
of the globalization of agricultural commodities
that combines theoretical analysis with concrete
case studies and emphasizes the extent to which
the constantly changing nature of global markets
results in different groups benefiting or suffering
from globalization at different times.
Davidson, Osha Gray.Broken Heartland: The Rise of
America’s Rural Ghetto. New York: Free Press, 1990.
Examination of the impact of the farm crisis upon
the nation’s farmers, including the rise of the rad-
ical right.
Hurt, R. Douglas.American Agriculture: A Brief Histor y.
Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994. Concise
overview of American agriculture from prehis-
toric times to the 1990’s.
Nordin, Dennis S., and Roy V. Scott.From Prairie
Farmer to Entrepreneur: The Transformation of Mid-
western Agriculture. Bloomington: Indiana State
University Press, 2005. A positive exploration of
the benefits of large-scale farming and the entre-
preneurial farmers who operate them.
Raeburn, Paul.The Last Harvest: The Genetic Gamble
That Threatens to Destroy American Agriculture. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. A detailed, scien-
tific examination of the impact of biogenetics on
American food supplies.
Kimberly K. Porter
See also Bioengineering; Business and the econ-
omy in the United States; Farm Aid; Farm crisis; In-
come and wages in the United States; Reagan, Ron-
ald; Soviet Union and North America.
AIDS epidemic
Definition Appearance and spread of an
infectious immunodeficiency syndrome
The appearance of rare opportunistic infections among
populations of gay men and intravenous drug abusers led
to the discover y of a previously unrecognized agent, now
called HIV. By the end of the decade, thousands of Ameri-
cans had been infected, and the disease itself, AIDS, had be-
gun to spread throughout the world.
While the presence of a disease subsequently known
as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)
was initially recognized in 1981, the disease’s etio-
logical agent, the human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV), had entered the human population several
times during the previous decades. Computer-
generated data measuring the rate of mutation of a
simian virus to one in humans has supported the
theory that penetration into the human population
may have occurred as early as the 1930’s.
Medical historian Jonathan Engel has suggested
that between 1950 and 1972, infection may have oc-
curred at least nineteen times. The oldest confirmed
infections took place in 1959. Antibodies against
HIV were found in blood collected in 1959 from a
Bantu man in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo, who suc-
cumbed to an immunodeficiency disease. That same
year, another man died in Manchester, England, ex-
hibiting the same immunodeficiency defects. Retro-
spective analysis of his stored blood confirmed infec-
tion by HIV.
Beginning of the Pandemic Recognition of an im-
munodeficiency syndrome was first reported in the
June 5, 1981, issue ofMorbidity and Mortality Weekly
Report. The story, originating from the Centers for
Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, described an un-
usual and rare parasitic lung infection, Pneumocystis
carinii pneumonia (PCP), in five homosexual men
in Los Angeles. The outbreak came to the attention
of the CDC because the only known treatment, a
drug called pentamadine isothionate, was available
only from that agency.
Later that summer, the CDC reported that an un-
usual epidemic among gay men was more wide-
spread than had earlier been thought: More than
140 previously healthy young men had been diag-
nosed with either PCP or a rare form of cancer called
Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS). Generally only observed pre-
viously among Italian or Jewish men of Mediterra-
nean origin, KS was unheard-of in the age popula-
tion now being observed. Furthermore, the newly
detected form of KS was much more aggressive than
were previously known instances. Because the dis-
ease had only been reported until then in homosex-
uals, it was initially referred to as gay-related immu-
nodeficiency disorder (GRID).38 AIDS epidemic The Eighties in America