"However urban the nation has become," Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston write, "twenty percent of its citizens still live outside major metropolitan areas. Moreover, rural economic activity agricultural, extractive, recreational, and industrial has an enormous impact on the nation's overall economic well-being. The stories of contemporary rural people still have the power to move us. . . . They reflect the values, dreams, and ideals at the core of the economically, racially, and ethnically diverse American experience."

The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State moves rural history into explorations of modern politics: diverse rural peoples and their complex relationships to the American state in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors examine African American progressive farm organizers; the experiences of Caribbean and Mexican farm laborers; agrarian intellectuals in the New Deal; the politics of land and landscape in the Rocky Mountain west; and the origins of today's rural political movements."

The Catholic Rural Life Movement of the mid-twentieth century worked to safeguard the future of both farming and faith as its "motor missions" traveled to the heartland, adapting liturgical traditions to rural conditions. The Catholic missionaries joined with other groups, both religious and secular, to improve American farming practices after the "dust bowl" crisis. Simultaneously responding to a perceived crisis of belief, they worked to save the faith from modernist doctrines and to gain rural converts to a religious practice that was associated mainly with urban immigrants. "Saving the Heartland" explores the process by which rural Catholicism finally won recognition as a religious subculture in need of its own devotions, celebrations, and publications.

This book is designed to present and appraise techinques of social research to students and graduates operating in rural communities in developing countries. It questions the validity of adopting methodologies used in the industrialised world into the less-industrialised world, where rural populations dominate. The study details the stages involved in the process of social research; the problems and issues of fieldwork; methods of data collection; problems of research strategies particular to social science; writing of research reports; and the wider uses of social research.

How do peasants come to think of themselves as members of a nation? The widely accepted argument is that national sentiment originates among intellectuals or urban middle classes, then "trickles down" to the working class and peasants. Keely Stauter-Halsted argues that such models overlook the independent contribution of peasant societies. She explores the complex case of the Polish peasants of Austrian Galicia, from the 1848 emancipation of the serfs to the eve of the First World War.

In the years immediately after emancipation, Polish-speaking peasants were more apt to identify with the Austrian Emperor and the Catholic Church than with their Polish lords or the middle classes of the Galician capital, Cracow. Yet by the end of the century, Polish-speaking peasants would cheer, "Long live Poland" and celebrate the centennial of the peasant-fueled insurrection in defense of Polish independence.

The explanation for this shift, Stauter-Halsted says, is the symbiosis that developed between peasant elites and upper-class reformers. She reconstructs this difficult, halting process, paying particular attention to public life and conflicts within the rural communities themselves. The author's approach is at once comparative and interdisciplinary, drawing from literature on national identity formation in Latin America, China, and Western Europe. The Nation in the Village combines anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism with economic, social, cultural, and political history.

Transformations on the Ground considers the ways in which power in all its forms-local, international, legal, familial-affects the collision of global with local concerns over access to land and control over its use. In Botswana's struggle to access international economies, few resources are as fundamental and fraught as control over land. On a local level, land and control over its use provides homes, livelihoods, and the economic security to help lift populations out of impoverishment. Yet on the international level, global capital concerns compete with strategies for sustainable development and economic empowerment. Drawing on extensive archival research, legal records, fieldwork, and interviews with five generations of family members in the village of Molepolole, Anne M. O. Griffiths provides a sweeping consideration of the scale of power from global economy to household experience in Botswana. In doing so, Griffiths provides a frame through which the connections between legal power and local engagement can provide fresh insight into our understanding of the global.

This book is a lively account of a community working to combat suburban sprawl, to protect a large part of the landscape as common land, and to enjoy the land productively in an ecologically sustainable way. Based on the practical experience of one New England town, the book urges suburban environmentalists to go beyond preserving open space to actively engaging people with the places where they live. Brian Donahue, an environmental historian, in 1980 was a founder of Land's Sake, a community farm in Weston, Massachusetts. Working with the town's Conservation Commission, Land's Sake cultivates a twenty-five-acre organic fruit, flower, and vegetable farm, makes apple cider and maple syrup, maintains a sixty-five-mile trail system, harvests firewood and timber from fifteen hundred acres of town forest, and has kept draft horses and sheep. Donahue recounts the joys and sorrows of farming the suburbs. But beneath the light hearted tales of sheep straying into tennis courts and middle-school students tapping sugar maples in the town cemetery runs an incisive ecological history of New England and a penetrating analysis of how to live responsibly with this difficult but rewarding land. Donahue concludes with a call for all places to protect common land and establish community farms-especially in the suburbs, where most Americans live and where, like it or not, environmentalists may make their most lasting mark on the world.

This book presents an account of an intellectual breakthrough in the study of rural society and agriculture. Its ten chapters, selected for their originality and synthesis from the colloquia of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, encompass various disciplines, diverse historical periods, and several regions of the world. The contributors' fresh analyses will broaden the perspectives of readers with interests as wide-ranging as rural sociology, environmentalism, political science, history, anthropology, economics, and art history. The ten studies recast and expand what is known about rural society and agrarian issues, examining such topics as poverty, subsistence, cultivation, ecology, justice, art, custom, law, ritual life, cooperation, and state action. Each contribution provides a point of departure for new study, encouraging deeper thinking across disciplinary boundaries and frontiers.

In the second century A.D., Galilee fostered the formation of rabbinic Judaism. The society that flourished there has laid its mark on Judaism ever since, and it is a society that can be fully described through a large corpus of rabbinic writings.

A classic in its field, this charming work by a noted scholar explores traditional Irish customs and activities--from thatching a roof, churning butter, cultivating and harvesting crops, making pots and pans and building furniture to behavior at weddings, wakes, festivals, and funerals. "For all its learning, the book is popular in the best way, and admirably illustrated...."--Times Literary Supplement. (London)

American communities face serious challenges when military bases close. But affected municipalities and metro regions are not doomed. Taking a long-term, flexible, and incremental approach, Michael Touchton and Amanda J. Ashley make strong recommendations for collaborative models of governance that can improve defense conversion dramatically and ensure benefits, even for low-resource municipalities. Communities can't control their economic situation or geographic location, but, as Salvaging Community shows, communities can control how they govern conversion processes geared toward redevelopment and reinvention. In Salvaging Community, Touchton and Ashley undertake a comprehensive evaluation of how such communities redevelop former bases following the Department of Defense's Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. To do so, they developed the first national database on military redevelopment and combine quantitative national analyses with three, in-depth case studies in California. Salvaging Community thus fills the void in knowledge surrounding redevelopment of bases and the disparate outcomes that affect communities after BRAC. The data presented in Salvaging Community points toward effective strategies for collaborative governance that address the present-day needs of municipal officials, economic development agencies, and non-profit organizations working in post-BRAC communities. Defense conversion is not just about jobs or economic rebound, Touchton and Ashley argue. Emphasizing inclusion and sustainability in redevelopment promotes rejuvenated communities and creates places where people want to live. As localities and regions deal with the legacy of the post-Cold War base closings and anticipate new closures in the future, Salvaging Community presents a timely and constructive approach to both economic and community development at the close of the military-industrial era.

In 1975, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) led the country to independence after a ten-year guerilla war against Portuguese colonial rule. Peasants were essential to the victory, but once in power Frelimo evolved from a popular liberation movement into a bureaucratic one-party state whose policies proved to be as inimical to the peasantry as those of the Portuguese colonial regime. These policies not only characterized the socialist phase of Frelimo rule; they continued during the period of economic and political reform that took place in the 1990s under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund. Merle L. Bowen's book offers a fresh assessment of the impact that such policies, pursued by postindependence states and NGOs alike, have had on the peasantry and agricultural production in Africa.

In contrast to accounts that blame the state, the elite, or the peasantry itself for the agricultural crisis in postcolonial Africa, Bowen argues that Mozambique's decline in production is rooted in policies established during colonialism and continued by Frelimo. By tracing shifts in policy over a longer period than previous studies and across changing regimes, Bowen provides solid evidence that the continuation of colonial policies under the Frelimo government alienated the peasantry and contributed to internal conflict.

Bowen refuses to treat the peasantry as a homogeneous mass. Drawing on oral data, archival research, and published accounts, she charts the rise and fall of a stratum of middle class agricultural producers in southern Mozambique that she deems central to the problem of food production. Like those of the colonial government, Frelimo's anti-peasant policies are rooted in a desire to prevent this middle class from becoming politically and economically independent and thereby acting as a counterweight to state power. To address the agricultural crisis, Bowen calls for a reconsideration of Mozambican and IMF policies to support rather than suppress capital accumulation within this rural middle class.

Through its careful consideration of the peasantry and the role of NGOs, The State Against the Peasantry offers a nuanced understanding of the development process that has taken place in Mozambique and other southern African countries since independence.

With unprecedented use of local and national sources, Lauria-Santiago presents a more complex portrait of El Salvador than has ever been ventured before. Using thoroughly researched regional case studies, Lauria-Santiago uncovers an astonishing variety of patterns in land use, labor, and the organization of production. He finds a diverse, commercially active peasantry that was deeply involved with local and national networks of power. An Agrarian Republic challenges the accepted vision of Central America in the nineteenth century and critiques the "liberal oligarchic hegemony" model of El Salvador. Detailed discussions of Ladino victories and successful Indian resistance give a perspective on Ladinization that does not rely on a polarized understanding of ethnic identity.

For the Public Good: Women, Equity and Health in Rural India details the role of the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP), a groundbreaking, internationally recognized primary health care model that uses local solutions to solve intractable global health problems. Emphasizing equity and community participation, this grassroots approach recruits local women to be educated as village-based health workers. In turn, women village health workers collaborate to overcome the dominant double prejudices in local villages-caste and gender inequality. In one generation, village health workers have progressed from child brides and sequestered wives to knowledgeable health practitioners, valued teachers, and community leaders. Through collective efforts, CRHP has reduced infant and maternal mortality, eliminated some endemic health problems, and advanced economic well-being in villages with women's cooperative lending groups. For the Public Good describes how the recognition and elimination of embedded inequalities, in this case caste discrimination, gender subordination, and class injustice, promotes health and well-being and collaboratively establishes the public good.

"This is an enjoyable book that, for a brief while, will take many of its readers home." News-Journal (Mansfield, OH)

" Logsdon] offers warmth and insight.. The simpler life is within our reach if we will choose it." Booklist

"This is a quiet, reflective work that describes in some detail the difficulty of developing and maintaining a lifestyle supported by the land, something easier planned than maintained.... a memoir of the spiritual path of one escapee." Bloomsbury Review

"Deliciously irreverent, endearingly self-deprecating, full of good humor, Gene Logsdon s latest work is his personal testament to home, the retaining of which has been (Carol aside) the passion of his life." Ohio Ecological Food & Arm Association News

"Gene Logsdon has lived by failing according to most people s standards of success, and has made a good life. A good book, too. I like You Can Go Home Again (to name one reason of several) because it comes from experience. It has to do, not with speculation or theory or wishful thinking, but with what is possible." Wendell Berry

"Gene Logsdon demonstrates once again that a combination of intelligence, scholarship, passion, and fervent patriotism can equal only one characteristic these days, a contrary mind of a high order." Wes Jackson, The Land Institute

"In this vigorous memoir of his search for the good life, Gene Logsdon tells us why America s agrarian values matter to our future as well as to our past. Living simply, respecting the land, taking pleasure from the work of our hands, supplying many of our own needs, acting as neighbors those values have not been lost, they ve only been displaced, shoved to the margins. And Logsdon shows how we might draw them back to the center of our lives." Scott Russell Sanders

Here is a book for everyone who has dreamed about going back to the land to live a simpler more meaningful life. Gene Logsdon s story embodies both the frustrations and longing so many of us feel as we search for our essential selves and a happy harmonious economic existence. The measure of his courage and contrariness is that he has been successful. In You Can Go Home Again, he tells us what motivated him and what success has meant."

In 1880, ancient-growth forest still covered two-thirds of West Virginia, but by the 1920s lumbermen had denuded the entire region. Ronald Lewis explores the transformation in these mountain counties precipitated by deforestation. As the only state that lies entirely within the Appalachian region, West Virginia provides an ideal site for studying the broader social impact of deforestation in Appalachia, the South, and the eastern United States. Most of West Virginia was still dominated by a backcountry economy when the industrial transition began. In short order, however, railroads linked remote mountain settlements directly to national markets, hauling away forest products and returning with manufactured goods and modern ideas. Workers from the countryside and abroad swelled new mill towns, and merchants ventured into the mountains to fulfill the needs of the growing population. To protect their massive investments, capitalists increasingly extended control over the state's legal and political systems. Eventually, though, even ardent supporters of industrialization had reason to contemplate the consequences of unregulated exploitation. Once the timber was gone, the mills closed and the railroads pulled up their tracks, leaving behind an environmental disaster and a new class of marginalized rural poor to confront the worst depression in American history. |Examines the impact of the rapid, unregulated deforestation of West Virginia between 1880 and 1920, a short-lived timber boom that left behind an environmental disaster.

The nostalgic vision of a rural Midwest populated by independent family farmers hides the reality that rural wage labor has been integral to the region's development, says Deborah Fink. Focusing on the porkpacking industry in Iowa, Fink investigates the experience of the rural working class and highlights its significance in shaping the state's economic, political, and social contours. Fink draws both on interviews and on her own firsthand experience working on the production floor of a pork-processing plant. She weaves a fascinating account of the meatpacking industry's history in Iowa--a history, she notes, that has been experienced differently by male and female, immigrant and native-born, white and black workers. Indeed, argues Fink, these differences are a key factor in the ongoing creation of the rural working class. Other writers have denounced the new meatpacking companies for their ruthless destruction of both workers and communities. Fink sustains this criticism, which she augments with a discussion of union action, but also goes beyond it. She looks within rural midwestern culture itself to examine the class, gender, and ethnic contradictions that allowed--indeed welcomed--the meatpacking industry's development. |Drawing on firsthand experience working in an Iowa pork-processing plant, Fink looks at the differing experience of male and female, immigrant and native-born, black and white workers in the meatpacking industry.

An investigative journalist and editor of the "Boulder Weekly" presents an expose of today's growing antigovernment movement and the connection between the farm crisis of the 1980s and the massive buildup of militia groups in the United States. "Harvest of Rage" also exposes the underlying economic policies that helped trigger the current heartland revolt.

"While locals are inherently integral to land use decisions, their story is seldom coherently placed within the context of competing interests. Knott effectively places local perspectives in the Adirondack land use conflict to illustrate the need for participatory approaches to decision-making." Valerie A. Luzadis, SUNY College of Environmental Science and ForestryAttitudes about land use, Catherine Henshaw Knott suggests, may reflect profound differences in class, religion, and life experience, pitting urban Americans who see nature at risk against rural Americans whose lives are dominated by nature's forces. She documents the thoughts and feelings of people whose lives are intimately connected to the forest, including loggers, trappers, craftspeople, and guides, as well as tree farmers and maple syrup producers. After describing the key players in the conflict and chronicling battles and bridge-building between stake-holders, Knott concludes that the participation of local people in decision making is the only process that can shift an increasingly hostile cycle toward resolution."

The Worm in the Wheat is a compelling tale of political intrigue, violence, shifting allegiances, extreme poverty, and the recalcitrance of one woman. Above all, it is a multileveled interpretation of the Mexican revolution and the ultimate failure of agrarian reform. Timothy J. Henderson recounts the story of Rosalie Evans, a woman who lost her life defending her Mexican hacienda in defiance of confiscation decrees. This dramatic narrative is populated with many diverse actors: Mexican, British, and American officials, soldiers, rebel leaders, bureaucrats, peasants, vigilantes, and the unforgettable figure of Evans herself. In a world where power and wealth are distributed unevenly and where revolutionary ideas aiming to right the balance continue to proliferate, it is essential, Henderson claims, to understand the revolutionary process not as a philosophical abstraction but as intimate human drama. This book, by providing a detailed study of a single case, sheds invaluable light on this process and on the making of modern Mexico. Incorporating extensive primary research, Henderson describes the complexity of international, national, state, and local politics and the corresponding diverse responses to this historic attempt at agrarian reform. The Worm in the Wheat will be informative reading for those interested in the modern history of Mexico, students of social movements and revolution, Latin Americanists, and scholars of agrarian history.

Susan Fenimore Cooper, the daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, was a philanthropist who helped young girls and boys through an orphanage in Cooperstown, New York. While she worked with these disadvantage children, she wrote one of American's earliest examples of naturist writing. Forgotten for many years, recent discoveries have made her book, Rural Hours, a forgotten gem of classic nature writing.

Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State brings together new research on the social history of Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aviva Chomsky and Aldo A. Lauria Santiago have gathered both well-known and emerging scholars to demonstrate how the actions and ideas of rural workers, peasants, migrants, and women formed an integral part of the growth of the export economies of the era and to examine the underacknowledged impact such groups had on the shaping of national histories. Responding to the fact that the more common, elite-centered "national" histories distort or erase the importance of gender, race, ethnicity, popular consciousness, and identity, contributors to this volume correct this imbalance by moving these previously overlooked issues to the center of historical research and analysis. In so doing, they describe how these marginalized working peoples of the Hispanic Caribbean Basin managed to remain centered on not only class-based issues but on a sense of community, a desire for dignity, and a struggle for access to resources. Individual essays include discussions of plantation justice in Guatemala, highland Indians in Nicaragua, the effects of foreign corporations in Costa Rica, coffee production in El Salvador, banana workers in Honduras, sexuality and working-class feminism in Puerto Rico, the Cuban sugar industry, agrarian reform in the Dominican Republic, and finally, potential directions for future research and historiography on Central America and the Caribbean. This collection will have a wide audience among Caribbeanists and Central Americanists, as well as students of gender studies, and labor, social, Latin American, and agrarian history. Contributors. Patricia Alvarenga, Barry Carr, Julie A. Charlip, Aviva Chomsky, Dario Euraque, Eileen Findlay, Cindy Forster, Jeffrey L. Gould, Lowell Gudmundson, Aldo A. Lauria Santiago, Francisco Scarano, Richard Turits

Wide critical acclaim greeted the author's memoir In Good Hands: The Keeping of a Family Farm (1995, FSG). Maxine Kumin wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "Unflinching observation is the strength of Charles Fish's account ... His splendid book is informative, reflective, investigative, and wise".

With the same keen observation and lyrical prose, Charles Fish has turned to the country fairs of his youth. Country fairs still draw crowds, and readers will recognize many of the features so strikingly captured in this book. But times have changed. "Looming larger for the young than they do today", Fish writes, "the fairs as I knew them are emblematic of a passing way of life. They were rich with images and wonders at a time when entertainment was more restrained, the panorama of the wide world less brutally revealed. They presented forms of excellence growing out of our daily life -- fine cattle, fast horses, efficient machines -- but they also offered provocative glimpses of forms of pleasure and the grotesque usually veiled in our little village".

While never ceasing to entertain and inform, Blue Ribbons and Burlesque also raises questions about nature and nurture, theatrical illusion, the pursuit of excellence, and the power of novelty and the erotic.

The author of this study suggests that attitudes toward land-use may reflect profound differences in class, religion and life experience, pitting urban Americans who see nature at risk against rural Americans whose lives are dominated by nature's forces.

Winner of the 1990 Best Book Award from the New England Council on Latin American Studies

This study of Bolivia uses Cochabamba as a laboratory to examine the long-term transformation of native Andean society into a vibrant Quechua-Spanish-mestizo region of haciendas and smallholdings, towns and villages, peasant markets and migratory networks caught in the web of Spanish imperial politics and economics. Combining economic, social, and ethnohistory, Brooke Larson shows how the contradictions of class and colonialism eventually gave rise to new peasant, artisan, and laboring groups that challenged the evolving structures of colonial domination. Originally published in 1988, this expanded edition includes a new final chapter that explores the book's implications for understanding the formation of a distinctive peasant political culture in the Cochabamba valleys over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

After northern Wisconsin was cleared by commercial loggers early in the twentieth century, enthusiastic promoters and optimistic settlers envisioned transforming this "cutover" into a land of yeoman farmers. Here thousands of families-mostly immigrants or second-generation Americans-sought to recreate old worlds and build new farms on land that would come to be considered agriculturally worthless. In the end, they succumbed not to drought or soil depletion but to social and political pressures from those who looked askance at their way of life.

"Farming the Cutover" describes the visions and accomplishments of these settlers from their own perspective. People of the cutover managed to forge lives relatively independent of market pressures; and for this they were characterized as backward by outsiders and their part of the state was seen as a hideout for organized crime figures. State and federal planners, county agents, and agriculture professors eventually determined that the cutover could be engineered and the lives of its inhabitants improved. By 1940, they had begun to implement public policies that discouraged farming and they eventually decided that the region should be depopulated and the forests replanted.

By exploring the history of an eighteen-county region, Robert Gough illustrates the travails of farming in "marginal" areas. He juxtaposes the social history of the farmers with the opinions and programs of the experts who sought to improve the region, and shows how what occurred in the Wisconsin cutover anticipated the sweeping changes that would transform American agriculture after World War II. "Farming the Cutover" is a readable story of the hopes and failures of people who struggled to build new lives in an inhospitable environment. It makes an important counterpoint to Turnerian myths and the more commonly-told success stories of farming history.