Abstract

Ranging from pre-Columbian times to the enormous changes of the twentieth century, Born in the Country integrates agricultural, technological, and economic themes with new questions social historians have raised about the American experience--including the different experiences of whites and blacks, men and women, natives and new immigrants. --From publisher's description.

Table of Contents

Ruins and eagle feathers: a first word with the reader -- How to take a walk -- Paint: a moral question -- Music of light in old windows -- And God said: "Let there be red" -- Ghost under the necessary house -- Virgin on the farmall: the Venus in the Chevy -- Last insult of the glacier -- Petrified chin music -- Cutting slices out of the wind -- Towers rising from the floor of the sky -- Visible dead.

Table of Contents Introduction: Change, continuity, and the transformations of rural life -- And the crooked shall be made straight: rural road reform and the politics of localism -- Teach no more his neighbor: localism and rural opposition to educational reform -- Bringing forth strife: the ironies of dairy organization in the New York milkshed -- To reap the whirlwind: the social and ideological bases of farmers' grain elevators -- With all the fragrant powders of the merchant: mail-order buying in the...