Born in the Country

303 Pages·2017·13.226 MB·English

by  David B. Danbom

Born in the Country
Revisiting Rural Amer i ca
Pete Daniel and Mary C. Neth, Series Found ers
Born in the Country
a history of rural amer i ca
Third Edition
David B. Danbom
Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 1995, 2006, 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2017
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Danbom, David B., 1947– author.
Title: Born in the country : a history of rural Amer i ca / David B. Danbom.
Other titles: History of rural Amer i ca
Description: Third edition. | Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press,
[2017] | Series: Revisiting rural Amer i ca | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016052562 | ISBN 9781421423357 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781421423364 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Country life— United States— History. | Farm life— United
States— History. | Agriculture— United States— History. | United States—
Rural conditions.
Classification: LCC E179 .D25 2017 | DDC 307.1/4120973— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2016052562
A cata log rec ord for this book is available from the British Library.
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For Karen, this time, all of the time
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Contents
Preface to the Third Edition ix
Preface to the Second Edition xi
Preface to the First Edition xv
1 Rural Eu rope and Pre- Columbian Amer i ca 1
2 The Rural Development of En glish North Amer i ca 22
3 Maturity and Its Discontents 37
4 Agriculture and Economic Growth in the Young Republic 59
5 Rural Life in the Young Nation 79
6 The Unmaking and Remaking of the Rural South 99
7 Rural Amer i ca in the Age of Industrialization 121
8 Prosperity and Its Discontents 151
9 From the Best of Times to the Worst 175
10 The New Deal and Rural Amer i ca 195
11 The Production Revolution and the New Agriculture 220
12 Agriculture and Rural Life in the Twenty- First Century 240
Notes 253
Suggestions for Further Reading 257
Index 275
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Preface to the Third Edition
History may seem to be fixed and unchanging, but that could not be further
from the truth. By the time a book is published, the evidence on which it relies
has already been supplemented—or even superseded—by new evidence or new
interpretations of old evidence. And in a dynamic and constantly shifting disci-
pline, entirely new areas of study are opened by historians, while traditional ones
become scholarly backwaters, at least for a while. These realities pres ent a chal-
lenge to the historian, especially if he or she is determined to make a book timely
and relevant.
This prob lem is especially vexing to me. My desire to bring Born in the Country
up to the pres ent by fairly representing changes in rural Amer i ca requires revi-
sion on a regular basis. So does the dynamism of American history, reflected in
the rise of such relatively new fields as food history and the history of capitalism. I
do not expect this edition to be perfectly timely, because the discipline of history
will continue to move forward, even as each work of history is frozen in time, and
rural Amer i ca w ill continue to change, along with the rest of the country. What
I do hope, however, is that this edition will be more satisfying than the second
edition has become to teachers who use it in classes, to students who read it, and
to general readers who look to it for an overview of rural Amer i ca.
In order to keep abreast of a changing scholarly landscape and a changing
rural Amer i ca, I have expanded the second edition and revised it significantly in
places. Readers familiar with the first two editions will see little change in some
chapters and major changes in others. Some of my decisions to revise—or not to
revise— respond to reviewers’ and readers’ suggestions, but most are driven by
recent work in the field. Readers will see this most clearly in the last two chap-
ters. Chapter eleven, on the post– World War II production revolution, has been
shortened and significantly revised. And in place of the afterword that appeared
in the second edition, I have written a new chapter on rural Amer i ca in the
twenty- first century, which attempts to come to grips with the modern food
movement and with a rural Amer i ca that is no longer defined by agriculture. I