Research Guides: HIST 395: Famines in History: Home

Introduction

Famines are a historical development occurring throughout history in all global regions. They can be influenced by natural factors such as drought, erosion, climatic change, environmental mismanagement, and political corruption, immorality, and incompetence. They can also be used as political weapons with genocidal impact as demonstrated in the 20th century in locales as varied as China, Ethiopia, and Ukraine. Purdue Libraries have many resources on famines in history from commercial scholarly resources and from government information resources from multiple countries and international government organizations. This Libguide hopes to introduce users to these resources and the multiple ways in which scholars and policymakers have interpreted famines and responded effectively or ineffectively to these events.

Examples of Library of Congress Subject searches you can use to find books in the Purdue Libraries online catalog on famines include:

The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest
ISBN: 0195040546
Publication Date: 1986-10-09
The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in party-controlled "collective" farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by a "terror-famine," inflicted by the State on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and certain other areas by setting impossibly high grain quotas, removing every other source of food, and preventing help from outside--even from other areas of the Soviet Union--from reaching the starving populace. The death toll resulting from the actions described in this book was an estimated 14.5 million--more than the total number of deaths for all countries in World War I. Ambitious, meticulously researched, and lucidly written, The Harvest of Sorrow is a deeply moving testament to those who died, and will register in the Western consciousness a sense of the dark side of this century's history.

A useful example of the problems in documenting human-caused famines is provided by this Ukranian Canadian website on the Holodomor or Stalin's famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s. Many journalists and governments ignored or downplayed the severity of this genocide for political reasons. One of these journalists was the New York Times Walter Duranty as described in Ronald Radosh. "The Mendacity of Walter Duranty." New Criterion, 30 (10)(June 2012): 87-90.

Famine Memorial Photos
Flickr photo abulm of Famine Memorial in Dublin, Ireland.
Holomodor Memorial
Holomodor Memorial in Kyiv, Ukraine.