Legacy and land

As I pour over the census pages that track my family’s past, I find over and over that my ancestors scarred the soil.  The words “Farmer” and “farm laborer” indicate the occupation of most of the men who came before me.  I should not have felt surprise at this.  The reason for expansion, as Jason Godesky points out in A Short History of Western Civilization, rests in the fact that we kept using up the soil and so had to seek new soil to rip apart in order to grow our grains.