Reaping What We Sow: Community and Rural History

Abstract

One thing I learned on the farm: when you slop the hogs, if fewer hogs come to the trough to eat, you put out less slop. So, you are getting the short version (or less slop). I have spent so much time thinking about my role in this association that for a while I seemed to eat, drink, and sleep agricultural history. I realized that I had been thinking a little too much about our organization when I awoke in the middle of the night, turned to my wife, and asked if she would like to do something significant to help the Agricultural History Society. A lot of this thinking came from a challenge by a colleague recently. He asked how, in this day when the profession is interested in transnationalism, I can justify teaching U.S. rural history, how I can emphasize local community studies. As I see it, people all over the globe are part of a community. There is a sense in which (as Charles Joyner has reminded us) all history is local history?someplace. All too often, scholars address history at what we think of as the national or transnational level without consciously realizing that these higher, broader levels are in fact intellectual constructs rather than