From the top 10 bestselling author of The Cornish Midwife. Two years after losing her husband, Finn, Lexie Turner is still struggling. She knows she needs to move on, but she has no idea where to begin. Packing up her life in London, Lexie heads to the coastal town of Port Kara to spend the summer working out her next move. With only her beloved Labrador for company, it's the perfect place to start again. But life in Port Kara is nothing like Lexie expected! Soon, she finds herself drawn into the close-knit community, unable to hide away. And when she meets local man, Elliott Dorton, Lexie begins to feel her broken heart slowly come back to life... Elliott is kind but adventurous and his job requires him to take risks daily - something Lexie isn't ready to deal with. Can she trust in Elliott and risk her heart breaking a second time, or will their one Cornish summer be all that Lexie can hope for? From Jo Bartlett, the bestselling author of The Cornish Midwives Series, comes another emotional read about second chances and having the courage to grab them with all your heart. Praise for Jo Bartlett: 'I love second chance stories. I love returning home stories. So a book combining both is an absolute winner for me. The Cornish Midwife is simply gorgeous. Stunning setting, wonderful characters, and oozing with warmth. A triumph from Jo Bartlett.' Jessica Redland 'Perfectly written and set in the beating heart of a community, this story is a wonderful slice of Cornish escapism.' Helen J Rolfe

The brand-new instalment in Fenella J. Miller's bestselling Goodwill House series.August 1940 As Autumn approaches, Lady Joanna Harcourt is preparing for new guests at Goodwill House - land girls, Sally, Daphne and Charlie. Sally, a feisty blonde from the East End, has never seen a cow before, but she's desperate to escape London and her horrible ex, Dennis. And although the hours are long and the work hard, Sal quickly becomes good friends with the other girls Daphne and Charlie and enjoys life at Goodwill House. Until Dennis reappears threatening to drag her back to London. Sal fears her life as a land girl is over, just as she finally felt worthy. But Lady Joanna has other ideas and a plan to keep Sal safe and doing the job she loves. Don't miss the next heart-breaking instalment in Fenella J. Miller's beautiful Goodwill House series. Praise for Fenella J. Miller: 'Curl up in a chair with Fenella J Miller's characters and lose yourself in another time and another place.' Lizzie Lane 'Engaging characters and setting which whisks you back to the home front of wartime Britain. A fabulous series!' Jean Fullerton

Tucked into the files of Iowa State University's Cooperative Extension Service is a small, innocuous looking pamphlet with the title Lenders: Working through the Farmer-Lender Crisis. Cooperative Extension Service intended this publication to improve bankers' empathy and communication skills, especially when facing farmers showing "Suicide Warning Signs." After all, they were working with individuals experiencing extreme economic distress, and each banker needed to learn to "be a good listener." What was important, too, was what was left unsaid. Iowa State published this pamphlet in April of 1986. Just four months earlier, farmer Dale Burr of Lone Tree, Iowa, had killed his wife, and then walked into the Hills Bank and Trust company and shot a banker to death in the lobby before taking shots at neighbors, killing one of them, and then killing himself. The unwritten subtext of this little pamphlet was "beware." If bankers failed to adapt to changing circumstances, the next desperate farmer might be shooting.This was Iowa in the 1980s. The state was at the epicenter of a nationwide agricultural collapse unmatched since the Great Depression. In When a Dream Dies, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg examines the lives of ordinary Iowa farmers during this period, as the Midwest experienced the worst of the crisis. While farms failed and banks foreclosed, rural and small-town Iowans watched and suffered, struggling to find effective ways to cope with the crisis. If families and communities were to endure, they would have to think about themselves, their farms, and their futures in new ways. For many Iowan families, this meant restructuring their lives or moving away from agriculture completely. This book helps to explain how this disaster changed children, families, communities, and the development of the nation's heartland in the late twentieth century. Agricultural crises are not just events that affect farms. When a Dream Dies explores the Farm Crisis of the 1980s from the perspective of the two-thirds of the state's agricultural population seriously affected by a farm debt crisis that rapidly spiraled out of their control. Riney-Kehrberg treats the Farm Crisis as a family event while examining the impact of the crisis on mental health and food insecurity and discussing the long-term implications of the crisis for the shape and function of agriculture.

During the American Civil War, thousands of citizens in the Deep South remained loyal to the United States. Though often overlooked, they possessed broad symbolic importance and occupied an outsized place in the strategic thinking and public discourse of both the Union and the Confederacy. In True Blue, Clayton J. Butler investigates the lives of white Unionists in three Confederate states, revealing who they were, why and how they took their Unionist stand, and what happened to them as a result. He focuses on three Union regiments recruited from among the white residents of the Deep South-individuals who passed the highest bar of Unionism by enlisting in the United States Army to fight with the First Louisiana Cavalry, First Alabama Cavalry, and Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry. Northerners and southerners alike thought a considerable amount about Deep South Unionism throughout the war, often projecting their hopes and apprehensions onto these embattled dissenters. For both, the significance of these Unionists hinged on the role they would play in the postwar future. To northerners, they represented the tangible nucleus of national loyalty within the rebelling states on which to build Reconstruction policies. To Confederates, they represented traitors to the political ideals of their would-be nation and, as the war went on, to the white race, making them at times a target for vicious reprisal. Unionists' wartime allegiance proved a touchstone during the political chaos and realignment of Reconstruction, a period when many of these veterans played a key role both as elected officials and as a pivotal voting bloc. In the end, white Unionists proved willing to ally with African Americans during the war to save the Union but unwilling to protect or advance Black civil rights afterward, revealing the character of Unionism during the era as a whole.

Afghanistan in the 20th century was virtually unknown in Europe and America. At peace until the 1970s, the country was seen as a remote and exotic land, visited only by adventurous tourists or researchers. Afghan Village Voices is a testament to this little-known period of peace and captures a society and culture now lost. Prepared by two of the most accomplished and well-known anthropologists of the Middle East and Central Asia, Richard Tapper and Nancy Tapper-Lindisfarne, this is a book of stories told by the Piruzai, a rural Afghan community of some 200 families who farmed in northern Afghanistan and in summer took their flocks to the central Hazarajat mountains. The book comprises a collection of remarkable stories, folktales and conversations and provides unprecedented insight into the depth and colour of these people's lives. Recorded in the early 1970s, the stories range from memories of the Piruzai migration to the north a half century before, to the feuds, ethnic strife and the doings of powerful khans. There are also stories of falling in love, elopements, marriages, childbirth and the world of spirits. The book includes vignettes of the narrators, photographs, maps and a full glossary. It is a remarkable document of Afghanistan at peace, told by a people whose voices have rarely been heard.

Rural life is more complex than it is perhaps credited. This edited volume explores several themes that highlight such complexities, particularly in terms of what they imply for rural teaching and learning. These themes include the geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic diversity within and across rural communities; the notion that rurality is not a deficit but rather a context; and the array of novel and interesting ways to build upon rural assets and overcome challenges so that rural students are not afforded fewer educational opportunities simply by virtue of their zip code. More practically, this book offers counsel for readers who may be interested in learning more about rural circumstances so that they can make informed and responsive decisions about policies and programs targeting rural students, educators, and schools.

Unmasked is the story of what happened in Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a collective turn from the coronavirus to the economy occurred in the COVID summer of 2020. State political failures, local negotiations among political and public health leaders, and community (dis)belief about the virus resulted in Okoboji being declared a hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town. The story is both personal and political. Author Emily Mendenhall, an anthropologist at Georgetown University, grew up in Okoboji, and her family still lives there. As the events unfolded, Mendenhall was in Okoboji, where she spoke formally with over 100 people and observed a community that rejected public health guidance, revealing deep-seated mistrust in outsiders and strong commitments to local thinking. Unmasked is a fascinating and heartbreaking account of where people put their trust, and how isolationist popular beliefs can be in America's small communities.

The accounts of women navigating pregnancy in a post-conflict setting are characterized by widespread poverty, weak infrastructure, and inadequate health services. With a focus on a remote rural agrarian community in northern Uganda, Global Health and the Village brings the complex local and transnational factors governing women's access to safe maternity care into view. In examining local cultural, social, economic, and health system factors shaping maternity care and birth, Rudrum also analyzes the encounter between ambitious global health goals and the local realities. Interrogating how culture and technical problems are framed in international health interventions, Rudrum reveals that the objectifying and colonizing premises on which interventions are based often result in the negative consequences in local healthcare.

India has one of the world's largest tribal populations. According to the 2011 census, the total tribal population was estimated at 8.6 percent in India. In Tamil Nadu, the tribal population is about 1.1 percent spread among six major primitive tribal communities. Consumption expenditure is one of the indicators of wellbeing and standard of living in households. This book focuses on the Malaiyali Tribe, which inhabits the Jawadhu hills. This tribal group lives below the poverty line, deriving main sources of income from seasonal agricultural and agricultural labor work. It also depends on secondary sources of income from gathering and selling forest-based products. The major objectives of the study are i) to identify factors influencing household income and expenditure patterns, and ii) to analyze income and expenditure patterns of scheduled tribe households. An appropriate study area will be chosen in the State of Tamil Nadu. The book aims to help understand tribal income and expenditure patterns, and it would be useful for designing further tribal livelihood programs in India and elsewhere.

Based on twenty-five years of fieldwork, Rural Women's Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Illiteracy: A Critical Perspective on Development examines rural women's behaviors towards health in several developing countries. These women are confronted with many factors: gender inequalities, violence from partners, and lack of economic independence. The book also gives insight into the general weakness of the health systems in place and questions the progress of numerous international conferences ICPD (International Conference on Population and Development) and MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) along with WHO (The World Health Organization) Frame Work for Action, UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) and CEDAW (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women) all supporting women's empowerment as related to violence, education, and reproductive health. Chapters provide numerous concrete examples and vignettes describing constraints on women in a variety of countries related to their intimate lives and their struggle between traditional and modern medicine. Widely practiced clandestine sex work is a challenge to HIV/AIDS programs. The book examines the women who choose clandestine sex work and their clients' sexual behavior and attitudes toward prostitution and HIV prevention. It also explores the negotiations between promiscuous, migratory men, and the ties of sexuality and fertility that women use to tie them to a male partner. The book argues for effective delivery of healthcare programs accompanied by multi-lateral responses from the civil society, governments, donors and agencies. Rural Women's Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Illiteracy is a useful resource scholars, as well as consultants and staff working in development agencies and public health.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. Setting out a new, path-breaking research agenda for global rural development, this timely book offers an innovative and embedded rural social science capable of both understanding and enacting progress towards diverse and sustainable pathways. It relocates rural development at the heart of global trends associated with widespread but uneven urbanisation, climate change and severe resource depletion, rising population growth, density and inequality, and global political, economic and health crises. Chapters collapse traditional binary notions of development as north-south, rural-urban, global-local and traditional modern, embracing a revised conceptualisation of uneven development as a process dependent upon multiple theoretical and conceptual frameworks. It offers potential routes for substantive, interlinked research agendas, including new ruralities, governance, land rights, agro-ecology, financialisation, power relations, family farming, and the role of markets. Scholars of geography, planning, rural sociology and rural-urban studies looking for a broader understanding of the topic will find this book essential. It will also be beneficial for those engaged in rural development policy and practice.

Rural areas are a key sector in every nation's economy due to a sizeable majority of the population living therein, as well as their impact on global agriculture and food security. Rural development transcends the availability of infrastructure, technology, and industrialization to also encompass the enviro-cultural and psycho-social needs of its inhabitants. The necessity for greater and deliberate efforts targeting all aspects of development of these rural areas is required to sustain growth. The Handbook of Research on Rural Sociology and Community Mobilization for Sustainable Growth is an essential reference source investigating how global trends, state policies, and grassroots movements affect contemporary rural areas in both developed and developing countries. Featuring research on topics such as gender and rural development, micro-financing, and water resource management, this book is ideally designed for government officials, policy makers, professionals, researchers, and students seeking coverage on the sustainable development of rural areas.

Aquaculture for both finfish and shellfish is expanding rapidly throughout the world. It is regarded as having the potential to provide a valuable source of protein in less developed countries and to be integrated into the farming systems and livelihoods of the rural poor. This book addresses key issues in aquaculture and rural development, with case studies drawn from several countries in South and Southeast Asia. Papers included cover topics ranging from production and technical issues (such as pond culture and rice field fisheries) to social aspects and research and development methodology. The book has been developed from a meeting of the Asian Fisheries Society. It is aimed at all concerned with aquaculture and rural development.

Rural tourism marketing is a subject that remains significantly under-researched. Gunjan Saxena seeks to encourage a fuller understanding of rural tourism marketing by uncovering the lived experiences and enterprise of different actor groups as they respond to the impact of tourism on their communities and cultural identities. Marketing Rural Tourism presents actor narratives to reveal nuances inherent in their practices and perceptions as they develop, support or oppose tourism in their locality. By focusing on actors' experience and enterprise involved in the ongoing production, consumption and marketing of rural landscapes for tourism, this book enables an insight into varied storylines that underlie the processes of place making. Academics in the area of marketing and tourism as well as development studies will appreciate the contribution this book will make to the wider marketing discourse that circulates about rural destinations. The book will also be a valuable resource to undergraduate students looking to incorporate fresh conceptual insights into their projects, as well as postgraduate students looking to apply newer approaches to conceptualising tourism or place marketing.

Ethnography in the Raw describes the author's encounters with the Philippine family into which he has married, his wife's friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles northeast of Manila. The book links detailed descriptions of his Philippine family with cultural practices such as circumcision, marriage and cockfights combined with theoretical musings on the concepts of sacrifice, social exchange, patron-client relations, food, and religious symbolism. It is both anthropological fieldwork 'in the raw,' and an incisive analysis of contemporary Philippine society and culture.

This classic in the annals of village studies will be widely read and debated for what it reveals about China's rural dynamics as well as the nature of state power, markets, the military, social relations, and religion. Built on extraordinarily intimate and detailed research in a Sichuan village that Isabel Crook began in 1940, the book provides an unprecedented history of Chinese rural life during the war with Japan. It is an essential resource for all scholars of contemporary China.