Elizabeth B. Jones is Associate Professor of German and European history at Colorado State University. Her recent publications explore state-led initiatives to ‘improve’ the German countryside with special emphasis on peat bog reclamation and colonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how poor rural Germans embraced, adapted, or rejected these endeavors. Previous publications include Gender and Rural Modernity: Farm Women and the Politics of Labor in Germany , 1871–1933 (Ashgate, 2009) and articles on gender and generational conflicts and agrarian politics in Imperial and Weimar Germany. In 2010–2011, she was a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich and in 2015–2016, she will be on research leave in Berlin. E-mail: elizabeth.jones@colostate.edu