Will Sack

About my work

I work on the social and environmental history of the Asia Pacific. My dissertation, Rural Remains: Superpowers, Megacities, and 4-H’s Asian Century, brings insights out of the history of science and environmental history into the study of agrarian life in the Asia Pacific. My particular focus is the 4-H Program. Associated with harmless state fair pageantry in the United States, 4-H was in fact a powerful conduit of American Cold War influence in over eighty countries. This was especially true in East Asia, where concerns over Maoism and peasant revolution spurred massive investment in rural propaganda and programs. 4-H was the second-largest rural institution in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan for most of the Cold War, following only the military in each place. My work reveals this hidden history, using 4-H to shed new light on the ways that ideology, policy, engineering, and medicine intersected to remake rural life. In turn, I show how rural development became a motor of urbanization, and thus a primary engine of economic growth, in some of the most lauded economies of the 20th century. Gender, technology, inequality, and the costs of growth come into new focus in Rural Remains.

The dissertation draws on research in five languages at over thirty-five archives, including the private archives of national 4-H organizations in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, as well as regional rural revitalization offices, agricultural colleges, county governments, and many other public and private archives. I have also interviewed thirty former participants on the record, and many more off-the record, to help understand these documents and what ‘growing up with 4-H’ meant. That project has been awarded grants from the Fulbright Program (IIE- Japan), the Fulbright-Hays program (Taiwan), the Kyujanggak Junior Fellowship program (Seoul National University, Korea – declined) and a “CCS Research Grant for Foreign Scholars…” (Taiwan – declined), among other smaller grants.

Before entering the PhD, I graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in History & East Asian Studies, where my thesis on Manchurian soy agriculture helped me win several awards, including a Palfrey Exhibition “for most distinguished scholar in the graduating class on a stipendiary scholarship.” After college, I spent a year in China and Japan on a Frederick Sheldon Fellowship working on farms including on a dairy in northern Hokkaido. I also was able to spend a year in South Korea studying language thanks to a Blakemore Fellowship. In total, I’ve spent six years studying, working, and researching in the Asia Pacific region.

My research is published and forthcoming in several venues, including Past & Present.