The emergence into pop culture of quaint and simple Ozarks Mountaineers-through the writings of Vance Randolph, Wayman Hogue, Charles Morrow Wilson, and others-was a comfort and fascination to many Americans in the early twentieth century. Disillusioned with the modernity they felt had contributed to the Great Depression, middle-class Americans admired the Ozarkers' apparently simple way of life, which they saw as an alternative to an increasingly urban and industrial America. Catherine S. Barker's 1941 book Yesterday Today: Life in the Ozarks sought to illuminate another side of these "remnants of eighteenth-century life and culture": poverty and despair. Drawing on her encounters and experiences as a federal social worker in the backwoods of the Ozarks in the 1930s, Barker described the mountaineers as "lovable and pathetic and needy and self-satisfied and valiant," declaring that the virtuous and independent people of the hills deserved a better way and a more abundant life. Barker was also convinced that there were just as many contemptible facets of life in the Ozarks that needed to be replaced as there were virtues that needed to be preserved. This reprinting of Yesterday Today-edited and introduced by historian J. Blake Perkins-situates this account among the Great Depression-era chronicles of the Ozarks.

A richly recounted memoir of growing up in an Irish farming community in the 1940s A love of Ireland and the Irish is what shines through this little memoir. Growing up amongst the fields, woods and characters of a farming community near Cork, Kathleen Iggulden depicts a world that is both immediate and real, yet belongs to a now-distant past. Here is a pony and trap to church every Sunday, evenings full of fiddle, flute and song, and new shoes and clothes twice a year. Kathleen's childhood in the 1930s involved two or three generations - her parents, her brother and sisters, as well as the daily lives of farmworkers and craftsmen, friends and relations. She beautifully chronicles rural celebrations and forgotten practicalities of country life - all painted with a sensitive touch and a freshness of observation. She saw her people as intensely polite, decent and innocent, with humour and music always ready. She saw them as poets, and poetry as the highest art. Recounted with immense charm and wit, A House for Two Pounds is a wonderful, vivid account of a childhood on an Irish farm - and an enduring people, just on the cusp of change.

England is an old country, more deeply conditioned by its past than perhaps any of us realise. It is also a varied country, particularly in relation to its size; this fact, too, has left its imprint on our past. Antiquity and diversity are the hallmarks of English landscape and society, with evidences of the logic of history evident everywhere we look. In this collection of essays Alan Everitt looks at the interconnections between landscape and community, demonstrating how places, localities, counties and regions all shed light on English society and history as a whole. Covering topics such as regional evolution, lost towns of England, the agrarian landscape in Kent, the English urban inn, and dynasty and community since the 17th century, Everitts essays cpature the wealth of experience and local idiosyncracies that constitute Englands rich history and culture.

No one has done more to emphasise the significance of the land in early modern England that Joan Thirsk, whose writings are both an important contribution to its history and point the way for future research. The subjects of this collection include the origin and nature of the common fields, Tudor enclosures, the Commonwealth confiscation of Royalist land and its subsequent return after the Restoration, inheritance customs, and the role of industries in the rural economy, among them stocking knitting.

Susan Wadley first visited Karimpur--the village "behind mud walls" made famous by William and Charlotte Wiser--as a graduate student in 1967. She returned often, adding her observations and experiences to the Wisers' field notes from the 1920s and 1930s. In this long-awaited book, Wadley gives us a work of unprecedented scope: a portrait of an Indian village as it has changed over a sixty-year period.
She hears of changes in agriculture, labor relations, education, and the family. But Karimpur's residents do not speak with one voice in describing the ways their lives have changed--viewpoints vary considerably depending on the speaker's gender, economic status, and caste. Using cultural documents such as songs and stories, as well as data on household budgets and farming practices, Wadley examines what it means to be poor or rich, female or male. She demonstrates that the forms of subordination prescribed for women are paralleled by those prescribed for lower castes.
Villagers also speak of political struggles in India, and of the importance of religion when confronting change. Their stories, songs, and life histories reveal the rich fabric of Karimpur and show how much can be learned from listening to its people.

Based on a study of recent political behaviour in a rural region of India, the author presents a critique of pluralist theories of democracy and advances a new approach to political sociology. Professor Lele insists that the politicians of Maharashtra sustain, however dispersed, a hegemonic class rule. The processes of development and modernization directly serve strategies of private gain through the public sphere; the elites continue to enclose the public sphere while propagating the myth of open competition. Case studies of local, state, and national politicans illustrate this behaviour and show how competition between powerful alliances is effectively moderated. The concluding section proposes a new comparative approach to political sociology. It demonstrates the inherent contradiction between domination and community, and argues for a historical analysis of the rise and fall of classes and ideologies. Professor Lele challenges the emphasis on modernization and instrumentality in contemporary social science, and suggests that the insights of Marx and Weber can lead to a more previse and universal framework for the study of societies.

Colonialism in Modern America is a series of essays exploring the economic and social problems of the region within the context of colonialism. It is a relatively simple task to document the social ills and the environmental ravage that beset the people and land of Appalachia. However, it is far more difficult and problematic to uncover the causes of these tragic conditions.

Tracing the journey of meat from the farm to the meat shop and other workspaces of the butcher within the multi-sited margins in Delhi, the current volume intimately follows the lives of Qureshi butchers and other meat sector workers in this transforming mega-city. The author addresses the tensions that meat throws up in a bristling society whose stakes are now more than ever intense. She shows how meat is also a rising sector in the Indian economy, and fetches precious foreign exchange. Qureshi butchers stand at the crossroads of class, caste, stigma, religion, market, urban ecological policies, and a never-ceasing political debate around these issues. Delhi's Meatscapes brings together rare archival documents, vernacular sources, and ethnographic insights gleaned from several years of immersion in the city's meatscapes and is the first of its kind for urban anthropologists, economists, political scientists, policy planners and readers who wish to take a hard look at their own (non-) meat choices.

An historian analyzes the scope, importance, and effects of technological upheaval in America's farmland regions, using case studies to illuminate the transformation of a yeoman-farmer republic into an agro-industrial empire.

An inside look at why the Republican Party has come to dominate the rural American South Beginning with the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 and extending through the 2020 election cycle, political scientists M.V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee trace the process by which rural white southerners transformed from fiercely loyal Democrats to stalwart Republicans. While these rural white southerners were the slowest to affiliate with the Grand Old Party, they are now its staunchest supporters. This transition and the reasons for it are vital to understanding the current electoral landscape of the American South, including states like Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, all of which have the potential to exert enormous influence over national electoral outcomes. In this first book-length empirically based study focusing on rural southern voters, Hood and McKee examine their changing political behavior, arguing that their Democratic-to-Republican transition is both more recent and more durable than most political observers realize. By analyzing data collected from their own region-wide polling along with a variety of other carefully mined sources, the authors explain why the initial appeal of 1950s Republicanism to upscale white southerners in metropolitan settings took well over a half-century to yield to, and morph into, its culturally conservative variant now championed by rural residents. Hood and McKee contend that it is impossible to understand current American electoral politics without understanding the longer trajectory of voting behavior in rural America and they offer not only a framework but also the data necessary for doing so.

Honour, family, and patronage refer to the fundamental values and institutions of a traditional community of Sarakatsani shepherds in the Greek mountains. The community comprises six hundred mutually antagonistic and competing families whose members accept few moral obligations beyond the immediate family and a restricted circle of kin.

Sara McIntyre, the daughter of the artist Peter McIntyre, was nine years old when her family first came to Kakahi, in the King Country, in 1960. The family has been linked to Kakahi ever since. On the family car trips of her childhood, McIntyre got used to her fathers frequent stops for subject matter for painting. Fifty years on, when she moved to Kakahi to work as a district nurse, she began to do the same on her rounds, as a photographer. This book brings together her remarkable photographic exploration her observations of Kakahi and the sparsely populated surrounding King Country towns of Manunui, Ohura, Ongarue, Piriaka, Owhango and Taumarunui.

The failure to include gender in the economic history of rural development has severely limited our understanding of privatizing, collectivist and colonial economic policies that disrupted and transformed the lives of rural women and men in the modern world. This book is unique in its focus on female economic agency, and in its exploration of the latter virtue in comparative historical perspective. It presents the apparently disparate cases of 17th-century England, 20th-century Russia and the Soviet Union, and 20th-century Kenya, as their top-down modernization projects were implemented in similar fashion --particularly in the case of women. The female half of the population was largely absent from contemporary economic databases, but nevertheless stereotyped as obstacles to rational economic decision-making. Introducing rural women and their innovations into male-centered narratives of economic history lays the foundation for a more demographically balanced and realistic understanding of rural behavior and rural development. In this study, women's labor and land claims are the lens through which both female agency and the delegitimizing of women's land claims become more visible. Both policy-makers and their leading critics deployed virtually identical language to describe backward, unruly and invariably "unsightly" peasant women.

Health crises plague most economies irrespective of their average per capita income levels, and this is largely due to chronic and repeated illnesses. Contextualizing this paradigm in India, the India Public Finance and Policy Report: Health Matters is an attempt to discuss some of the most crucial issues faced by Indian health sectors and to examine alternatives for policymakers to provide affordable, reliable, and effective health care facilities to the people. This report compares three government-run social health insurance schemes-the Swasthya Sathi Scheme, the Aarogyasari Community Insurance Scheme, and a community-based health insurance scheme-to examine their effectiveness in reducing household's vulnerability to health shocks. Additionally, it brings to light the manipulation of health package deals by private hospitals to increase the amount patients spend on them. The report also estimates the inefficiencies across states and districts of India with regard to health care personnel and infrastructure. Moreover, the editors have put together a series of interviews with different stakeholders associated with the health care system, such as doctors, nurses, patients, and medical representatives, who discuss the problems that perturb this sector. Written in a lucid and non-technical language, this is a deeply researched theoretical and empirical commentary about health care and public polices in India.

Early in the twentieth century, for-profit companies such as Duke Power and South Carolina Electric and Gas brought electricity to populous cities and towns across South Carolina, while rural areas remained in the dark. It was not until the advent of publicly owned electric cooperatives in the 1930s that the South Carolina countryside was gradually introduced to the conveniences of life with electricity. Today, electric cooperatives serve more than a quarter of South Carolina's citizens and more than seventy percent of the state's land area, bringing not only power but also high-speed broadband to rural communities.The rise of "public" power-electricity serviced by member-owned cooperatives and sanctioned by federal and state legislation-is a complicated saga encompassing politics, law, finance, and rural economic development. Empowering Communities examines how the cooperatives helped bring fundamental and transformational change to the lives of rural people in South Carolina, from light to broadband. James E. Clyburn, the majority whip of the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina, provides a foreword.

Welcome to Gradieshti, a Soviet village awash in gray buildings and ramshackle fences, home to a large, collective farm and to the most oddball and endearing cast of characters possible. For three years in the 1960s, Vladimir Tsesis-inestimable Soviet doctor and irrepressible jester-was stationed in a village where racing tractor drivers tossed vodka bottles to each other for sport; where farmers and townspeople secretly mocked and tried to endure the Communist way of life; where milk for children, running water, and adequate electricity were rare; where the world's smallest, motley parade became the country's longest; and where one compulsively amorous Communist Party leader met a memorable, chilling fate. From a frantic pursuit of calcium-deprived, lunatic Socialist chickens to a father begging on his knees to Soviet officials to obtain antibiotic for his dying child, Vladimir's tales of Gradieshti are unforgettable. Sometimes hysterical, often moving, always a remarkable and highly entertaining insider's look at rural life under the old Soviet regime, they are a sobering expose of the terrible inadequacies of its much-lauded socialist medical system.

In this study of the problems of social organization in a rural community of Alberta, a drought-afflicted wheat-growing area centring round the town of Hanna is described as it appeared to the sociologist in 1946. Dr Burnet examines geographical and economic conditions in Hanna, and shows how farming practices, ways of living, and modes of tenure brought into the area from more humid regions proved ill adapted to the dry belt and delayed economic adjustment. In turn, the difficulties in the realm of economics had adverse social and cultural consequences in both the households and the community as a whole. The Hanna area was chosen for study, though not altogether typical, because it revealed more clearly than other areas not so severely hit by the drought of the 1930s the kind of disturbances within the Alberta social structure which made possible the rise of the Social Credit movement.

The extraordinary story of the small Vermont town that has likely produced more Olympians per capita than any other place in the country, Norwich gives "parents of young athletes a great gift--a glimpse at another way to raise accomplished and joyous competitors" (The Washington Post). In Norwich, Vermont--a charming town of organic farms and clapboard colonial buildings--a culture has taken root that's the opposite of the hypercompetitive schoolyard of today's tiger moms and eagle dads. In Norwich, kids aren't cut from teams. They don't specialize in a single sport, and they even root for their rivals. What's more, their hands-off parents encourage them to simply enjoy themselves. Yet this village of roughly three thousand residents has won three Olympic medals and sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics for the past thirty years. Now, New York Times reporter and "gifted storyteller" (The Wall Street Journal) Karen Crouse spills Norwich's secret to raising not just better athletes than the rest of America but happier, healthier kids. And while these "counterintuitive" (Amy Chua, bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) lessons were honed in the New England snow, parents across the country will find that "Crouse's message applies beyond a particular town or state" (The Wall Street Journal). If you're looking for answers about how to raise joyful, resilient kids, let Norwich take you to a place that has figured it out.

Although the death of the small town has been predicted for decades, during the 1990s the population of rural America actually "increased" by more than three million people. In this book, Sonya Salamon explores these rural newcomers and the impact they have on the social relationships, public spaces, and community resources of small town America.Salamon draws on richly detailed ethnographic studies of six small towns in central Illinois, including a town with upscale subdivisions that lured wealthy professionals as well as towns whose agribusinesses drew working-class Mexicano migrants and immigrants. She finds that regardless of the class or ethnicity of the newcomers, if their social status differs relative to that of oldtimers, their effect on a town has been the same: suburbanization that erodes the close-knit small town community, with especially severe consequences for small town youth. To successfully combat the homogenization of the heartland, Salamon argues, newcomers must work with oldtimers so that together they sustain the vital aspects of community life and identity that first drew them to small towns.An illustration of the recent revitalization of interest in the small town, Salamon's work provides a significant addition to the growing literature on the subject. Social scientists, sociologists, policymakers, and urban planners will appreciate this important contribution to the ongoing discussion of social capital and the transformation in the study and definition of communities. 2004 winner of the Robert E. Park Book Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section (CUSS) of the American Sociological Association

The issues analyzed in this book explore a range of questions that impact the sustainability of Australia's rural and regional education. Divided into three sections - university education, school education, and Indigenous education - the questions that are examined include: * How can students from homes where neither parent has received post-school education be encouraged to undertake higher education? * How can the collective needs of some children - for example, Indigenous students - be met? * Is competition beneficial for attracting all types of learners? * How does one re-distribute resources to those who are in most need? * How do we reward the more effective academics and teachers who impact learning? * How do we measure this impact? * How do we keep the most talented and motivated people in the teaching process? * How does assessment become an on-going developmental process that invigorates and stimulates interest and understanding?