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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities > Rural communities
Sumner, MO, pop. 102, near the Swan Lake National Wildlife Refuge,
proclaims itself "The Wild Goose Capital of the World." It even
displays Maxie, the World's largest goose: a 40-foot tall
fiberglass statue with a wingspan stretching more than 60 feet. But
while the 200,000 Canada geese that spent their falls and winters
at Swan Lake helped generate millions of dollars for the local
economy-with hunting and the annual Goose Festival-climate change,
as well as environmental and land use issues, have caused the birds
to disappear. The economic loss of the geese and the activities
they inspired served as key building blocks in the rural identities
residents had developed and treasured. In his timely and topical
book, Gone Goose, Braden Leap observes how members of this rural
town adapted, reorganized, and reinvented themselves in the wake of
climate change-and how they continued to cultivate respect and
belonging in their community. Leap conducted interviews with
residents and participated in various community events to explore
how they reimagine their relationships with each other as well as
their community's relationship with the environment, even as they
wish the geese would return.
In Singlewide, Sonya Salamon and Katherine MacTavish explore the
role of the trailer park as a source of affordable housing.
America's trailer parks, most in rural places, shelter an estimated
12 million people, and the authors show how these parks serve as a
private solution to a pressing public need. Singlewide considers
the circumstances of families with school-age children in trailer
parks serving whites in Illinois, Hispanics in New Mexico, and
African Americans in North Carolina. By looking carefully at the
daily lives of families who live side by side in rows of
manufactured homes, Salamon and MacTavish draw conclusions about
the importance of housing, community, and location in the families'
dreams of opportunities and success as signified by eventually
owning land and a conventional home. Working-poor rural families
who engage with what Salamon and MacTavish call the "mobile home
industrial complex" may become caught in an expensive trap starting
with their purchase of a mobile home. A family that must site its
trailer in a land-lease trailer park struggles to realize any of
the anticipated benefits of homeownership. Seeking to break down
stereotypes, Salamon and MacTavish reveal the important place that
trailer parks hold within the United States national experience. In
so doing, they attempt to integrate and normalize a way of life
that many see as outside the mainstream, suggesting that families
who live in trailer parks, rather than being "trailer trash,"
culturally resemble the parks' neighbors who live in conventional
homes.
In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being
one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a
Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal
preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the
countryside? And how did country people feel about the
revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material
worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a
reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of
Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern
edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath's conventional archives have
long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the
drama of the English Reformation, Morebath's only priest, Sir
Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the
churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir
Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the
names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a
rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a
sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique
window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed.
Sir Christopher Trychay's accounts provide direct evidence of the
motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country
communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of
1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat
and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and
silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the
towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents
the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and
increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the
Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of
taxes. Morebath's priest, garrulous to the end of his days,
describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear
the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.
This volume is based on papers from the second in a series of three
conferences that deal with the multi-scalar processes of
heritage-making, ranging from the local to the national and
international levels, involving different players with different
degrees of agency and interests. These players include citizens and
civil society, the state, and international organizations and
actors. The current volume focuses on the role of citizens and
civil society in the politics of heritage-making, looking at how
these players at the grass-roots level make sense of the past in
the present. Who are these local players that seek to define the
meaning of heritage in their everyday lives? How do they negotiate
with the state, or contest the influence of the state, in
determining what their heritage is? These and other questions will
be taken up in various Asian contexts in this volume to foreground
the local dynamics of heritage politics.
Country Life Readers
By Cora Wilson Stewart
Third Book
Preface
There is an increasing demand for the education of adult
illiterates who have somehow missed their opportunity in early
life, and also for the better education of adults that have a very
limited degree of learning. The city has provided for this need to
some extent with evening Schools, designed mainly for foreigners.
All the textbooks for evening schools have, therefore, been
prepared strictly for immigrants and city dwellers. Rural America
is coming to realize that there exists a need for education among
adults in the rural sections as much as among those in the cities.
For this reason moonlight schools, rural evening schools, which
begin their sessions on moonlight evenings, have been established
and have now been extended to fifteen States. The people attending
these schools demand textbooks which deal with the problems of
rural life and which reflect rural life, and to meet this demand
this book has been prepared. The author has utilized the
opportunity when the rural dweller is learning to read to stimulate
a livelier and more intelligent interest in such subjects as
agriculture, horticulture, good roads, home economics, health and
sanitation, and those subjects, which, if taught to him, will make
for a richer and happier life on the farm.
Suggestions to Teachers
An excellent opportunity is offered in this Reader to introduce
profitably certain objects and operations of rural life. If the
teacher will utilize this opportunity, it will both give an added
interest to the subject and impress the principles of the same.
Therefore, the teacher is urged to study these suggestions and to
follow them as carefully as possible.
1. The script, following the printed lesson, is designed to
constitute the writing lesson of the evening's session, and should
be copied at least ten times. The letters in script are intended
for additional practice work in copying.
2. In connection with the road lessons on pages 10 and 11, a
discussion of good and bad roads would be profitable, this
discussion being based on the facts stated in these lessons. For
instance, there may be an estimate of time lost and of injury to
team and wagon by bad roads.
3. For teaching the banking lesson on page 17, a supply of blank
checks should be provided in advance. After the lesson has been
read, the checks should be distributed among the students. Then,
after a line is read in concert, the action mentioned should be
performed by the class. For example, after the class reads, "I
write the date," all should write the date on their checks; after
reading the next line, they should write the name of the
payee.
4. The lessons on fruit will be more interesting if...
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Windham Press is committed to bringing the lost cultural heritage
of ages past into the 21st century through high-quality
reproductions of original, classic printed works at affordable
prices.
This book has been carefully crafted to utilize the original images
of antique books rather than error-prone OCR text. This also
preserves the work of the original typesetters of these classics,
unknown craftsmen who laid out the text, often by hand, of each and
every page you will read. Their subtle art involving judgment and
interaction with the text is in many ways superior and more human
than the mechanical methods utilized today, and gave each book a
unique, hand-crafted feel in its text that connected the reader
organically to the art of bindery and book-making.
We think these benefits are worth the occasional imperfection
resulting from the age of these books at the time of scanning, and
their vintage feel provides a connection to the past that goes
beyond the mere words of the text.
This paper argues that social protection policies and programs,
including safety nets programs designed to deliver short-term
relief, have an important role in promoting the resilience of the
people residing in dryland regions.
Unprecedented changes in Bangladesh's rural economy have driven
poverty reduction since 2000. This analysis of the dynamics of
rural growth, especially the role of agriculture and its
relationship to the non-farm economy, reveals priorities for
accelerating and channeling that dynamism.
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