Overview

""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.

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9780801487712

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Reviews

This collection of essays represents a major advance in the field of rural history. By focusing on the different dimensions of political activism and the role of the state in the countryside, it provides a much-needed rural perspective on some of the central issues of twentieth-centruy history. -Hal S. Barron, author of Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930.

""Attempting to offer a view of the variety of American agrarian experience, this edited volume includes treatments of Native Americans, African Americans, Caribbean and Mexican farm workers, Amish women and Applachian mountaineers.""-Public Administration Review, January/February 2002, Vol. 62, No. 1 ""An excellent collection of well-argued and provocative essays. It has much to tell us about rural America in the twentieth century and suggests the rich possibilities for still more rural history.""-David E. Hamilton, University of Kentucky, The Journal of American History, June 2003 ""This collection of essays represents a major advance in the field of rural history. By focusing on the different dimensions of political activism and the role of the state in the countryside, it provides a much-needed rural perspective on some of the central issues of twentieth-centruy history.""-Hal S. Barron, author of Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930. ""This rich and widely tracking anthology adds a vital new dimension to the story-or, more accurately, the stories -of rural America. Smart, inventive, and probing, the essays collected here connect the countryside firmly to modern times.This book offers instruction in both what American rural history was during the twentieth century and in how to study it.""-Jonathan Prude, co-editor of The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation

Author Information

Catherine McNicol Stock is Barbara Zaccheo Kohn '72 Professor of History at Connecticut College. She is coeditor of The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State, also from Cornell, and the author of Main Street in Crisis.

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