The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America

Abstract

In their introduction to The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State, Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston argue that historians have slighted the history of twentieth-century rural America in general and “the strikingly political relationship between rural people and the modern state” (p. 3) in particular. This volume, they hope, will continue “the process of revitalizing the history of rural America” (p. 4) by exploring that relationship. The editors and authors of the book's thirteen essays define “countryside” broadly to include poachers, agrarian advocates of Indian rights, Mexican and Jamaican migrant laborers, Amish rural settlements, and African American rural reformers. They write of battles over birth control and ski resorts, Yellowstone National Park and the War on Poverty. The institutions of the state they examine are as likely to be the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or the U.S. Army as they are the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its agencies.