The Rural Reformation

Spanish and Portuguese claims to American territories led to the passage of many early laws and the establishment of courts overseas. For the first decade after contact, few regulations restricted the behavior of the earliest Europeans abroad, and no laws governed their treatment of the indigenous inhabitants or, later, enslaved Africans. Questions over the reach and application of laws passed in Spain, specifically Castile, led to thousands of royal laws and decrees guiding jurists in the application of laws in the Americas. This body of law is known as derecho indiano. To bring order to the unruly conquistadors and resistant indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, Spain imposed laws governing relations between Spaniards and indigenous Americans. Abundant documentation on indigenous-Spanish interactions in courts has led to an outpouring of research on the intersection between crime and punishment and indigenous society in colonial Latin America. Compared to France and its territories’ Code Noir, however, no overarching legal code addressed Spanish and Portuguese colonists’ dealings with slaves. Determinations regarding slaves drew from medieval and early modern precedents, such as the Siete partidas. The three American tribunals of the Inquisition intervened into the lives of enslaved people as well. Except for a few studies on enslaved people’s interactions—usually unwilling—with the Inquisition, there are fewer studies of slavery and crime than those covering indigenous, European, and mixed-descent subjects. One key characteristic of the legal regime in Latin America is the tenuous division between ecclesiastical jurisdictions and secular law enforcement. The Inquisition, with seats established in Mexico City, Lima, and Cartagena de Indias, combined elements of both secular and ecclesiastical courts. Its jurisdiction over “sin crimes” has received more coverage than other judicial institutions in the colonial Americas. Studies of civil and ecclesiastical law enforcement skew toward the 18th century, due in part to the abundance of documentation for the later colonial period. In the early 21st century, however, scholars have turned their attention to the second half of the 17th century, beginning to fill a historiographical void. Mid- and late-20th-century scholars worked to reconstruct a comprehensive institutional and philosophical framework of the Iberian law in the Americas, which included both regional studies and empire-wide surveys. Overall, research on crime and punishment in Latin America has shifted away from institutional histories toward social histories of crime that delve more deeply into topics of race and gender, typically more narrow in geographic scope.

Reviewed by: The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century by Julianne Couch Emily Prifogle Julianne Couch, The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 230 pp. $35.00. Since at least the early nineteenth century, travelers, politicians, and reformers, as well as urban and rural residents alike, have claimed that the small midwestern town was disappearing, for better or worse. The decline of small-town communities is discussed today most frequently in the context of the rural opioid crisis and the voting patterns of the 2016 presidential election. The message is clear: rural communities are struggling in terms of economics, health, and education. Yet, Julianne Couch's The Small-Town Midwest: Resilience and Hope in the Twenty-First Century examines small communities that are surviving, some even thriving, in the Great Plains region. [End Page 142] Her travelogue visits nine small-town communities to seek out "the qualities that make people stick to small, rural places" (3). Couch's nine chapters, each devoted to a particular community, take her reader on a journey from Wyoming, where she lived until recently, through Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and then finally to Iowa, where she now resides. Couch tends to use the term small town more than rural to describe the communities she visits, and she focuses on using population size and access to goods and services to define what counts as "small." Couch implicitly recognizes the diversity among small towns. She likewise recognizes that the nine communities in her book might not be representative of even the Great Plains region, let alone the census-designated midwestern states. But that seems to be—at least partially—the point. There is far more variation across, and less harmony within, heartland small communities than many might expect. Moreover, Couch approaches the towns and her writing as "an interested traveler." While her work is informed by social science research, she does not purport to engage in academic analysis (9). Indeed, those looking for a sharp-eyed account of the underbelly of midwestern small towns will not find it here. The reader encounters most frequently the successful town boosters that have managed to keep a small community afloat, and that is the book's strength. Couch takes residents and their communities on their own terms with a healthy dose of skepticism but without condescension. From this perspective, she reveals the hope and resilience that remains within small midwestern towns. The reader meanders through the towns with Couch, being passed from one store owner to another, or from the local historian to the director of the local development organization. As the reader meets the towns' boosters, many recurring issues will be familiar to those who have studied or lived in small towns: outmigration, conservative politics, local history and tourism, homogenizing pressures, infrastructure challenges, aging populations, lack of healthcare services, and the centrality of local schools. One of the most striking themes is the mobility of rural residents. We know that many rural people travel long distances to work in more densely populated hubs, but in Couch's travels, the reader finds a different type of mobility. Many, perhaps even most, of the civic leaders Couch interviews have not lived in the same small town for their entire lives. Some were born into a rural community but moved away for education or a career only to find that employment, family, or retirement brought them back to the same [End Page 143] or a similar small town. Still others have left their city life to "escape" to the country. Couch herself is one of the latter type of rural itinerants, many of whom (like Couch) are creative individuals who provide rural communities with art, music, and theater. These residents add dynamism to the communities chronicled here, and it is primarily through their eyes that Couch explores the qualities of small towns that draw people to them. This dynamism, however, is matched by a "social-norming machinery" in the communities that sanctions transgressive behavior, including holding liberal political views, living outside of a heterosexual nuclear family, not attending a Christian church, or even proposing too bold...

Halle Pietism, Colonial North America, and the Young United States. Edited by Hans-Jurgen Grabbe. (Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008. Pp. 321. Cloth, $88.12.)Reviewed by Marie Basile McDanielThe collected articles in Halle Pietism, Colonial North America, and the Young United States detail the multifarious legacy of Halle's brand of pietism in North America, and to a lesser extent in England and India, from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. The theology, adherents, institutions, and networks of Halle's pietism profoundly affected the German-speaking peoples and their adaptation to the New World, especially in Pennsylvania. The authors in this collection of arti- cles draw on a variety of methods and sources to illustrate the full panoply of Halle-inspired activities (9), and the resulting articles, which were first presented at a conference in 2002, build and expand upon on another, sometimes disagreeing in interpretation but, like any really good conference, inspiring avenues for further investigation.Each of the fourteen individual articles presents a different line of inquiry roughly fitting into one of five subthemes: theology, pastors, pol- itics, science, and identity. Brought together, they clearly show that Hal- le's pietism influenced more people than its pastors did, that those people influenced culture in more arenas than religion, and that religion was therefore important to colonial and early republic Americans. Some articles present a counterargument: instances in which Halle pietism foiled to influence its students. Each article addresses the question of how much Halle could influence German speakers in America. Surpris- ingly, the answer is simultaneously a great deal and not at all.Peter Vogt, Theodore Runyon, and A. G. Roeber set the groundwork for exploring the theological influences of Halle pietism. Vogt argues that German-speaking migrants to eighteenth-century Pennsylvania held theologically determined ideas about church, which influenced their ca- pacity for adaptation and contributed to the rise of American religious pluralism. Runyon traces the innovative influence of pietistic theology - especially the experience of conversion, heart religion, mutual support institutions, public outreach, and lay leadership - on John Wesley and the rise of Methodism. Roeber, in turn, proceeds to the early nineteenth century, when Lutherans struggled over church order, yet stubbornly misinterpreted Martin Luther's Orders of Creation, relegating mar- riage to a legal contract, rather than accepting the doctrinal influence that Luther intended.Wolfgang Splitter, Norman Threinen, Mark Haberlein, and Marianne Wokeck move to the practitioners of Halle pietism and their influence over congregations. Splitter examines the near failure of Halle to procure adequate ministers for the congregations in Pennsylvania, with the subse- quent establishment of an independent Lutheran ministerium in the state. Threinen builds on Splitter's work by exploring the declining role of the aging Ziegenhagen, the man in charge of Halle's pietistic mission- ary activities, in maintaining links with North America. Haberlein ex- plores the consequences of the dearth of Halle-trained ministers in the Lancaster congregation that led to tensions between its laypeople and pastors. And Wokeck challenges this decline by emphasizing the success of the pioneer pastors of the 1740s and 1750s who used the Pfarrhaus or parsonage as model of exemplary Christian life and thereby retained a visual link to Old World traditions (224). …

This chapter considers the various factors that contribute to residents' sense of community in small towns. The discussion draws from Suzanne Keller's ethnographic study of community life in which she identifies ten key building blocks of community: territory or turf, membership criteria, an institutional framework, cultural values, a belief system, a myth of community, rituals and celebrations, a leadership structure, social networks, and the spirit of community. Keller's use of the term “institutional framework” refers to the laws, rules, sanctions, and rewards that provide governance to a community, whereas community values include cooperation and sharing. Community spirit in small towns is reinforced through periodic rituals that draw people out of their homes and away from work long enough to enjoy one another's company, engage in celebratory activities that involve sharing, and do something that explicitly reminds them that they are residents who have something in common.

Before reading this book, I mistakenly believed that the author was writing a family hagiography. A self-described “independent scholar,” I assumed that Ann Flesor Beck would not be up to the task of writing a well-documented, researched, and quality study of successful Greek immigrant confectioners to small-town central Illinois during the early twentieth century. I could not have been more wrong. Clearly, Beck has done her research, as evidenced by the fifty-six pages of notes and thirty-one-page bibliography, which includes many prominent immigration historians. She effectively uses a rarely explored rural niche to broadly discuss Greek immigration. As part of the Heartland Foodways series on “midwestern food traditions and practices” (p. ii), this book encourages the reader to investigate their other seven offerings.The first five chapters present an appropriate background for the following three that cover local Illinois history. Within those beginning chapters, Beck captures the essence of Greek immigration by discussing Greek history and geography, the reasons for leaving the homeland, the importance of the Greek Orthodox Church, the negative reception endured by southern Europeans in the United States, “Americanization,” and the initial immersion in an urban environment. By reviewing only arrival in Chicago and St. Louis, the way stations en route to central Illinois, Beck successfully traces the history of many Greek immigrants that acquired capital by laboring in those respective cities to eventually begin businesses in rural areas. This introductory portion also encompasses many well-known immigrant experiences including chain and circular migration, places such as Hull House in Chicago, and “padrones” like those included in Gunther Peck's Reinventing Free Labor.The fifth chapter, “Greeks vs. Goblins,” presents a comprehensive history of the Ku Klux Klan and particularly the organization's impact in central Illinois. Beck adeptly characterizes the Klan by emphasizing the “ordinariness” of members within small-town communities. Klan believers dominated many of these small towns throughout the Midwest by capitalizing on fraternal interest as well as the “100-percent Americanism” ideology that emanated during the post–World War I era in reaction to “foreign” peoples and ideas. Resultingly, many Greeks suffered discrimination, but others were able to withstand this offensive by becoming viable economic and social members of the community.The final three chapters provide detailed information about Beck's grandfather, the originator of the family confectionery in Tuscola, Illinois, in addition to a thorough review of both small cities and towns in the central portion of the state. Although the depth of reporting through the use of personal interviews, publications, census and draft records is impressive, it is also exhausting and confusing due to the overlapping of communities and families. Beck has compiled a wealth of information, but a more focused approach on a few personalities and less speculation may have made for a more readable book. Nonetheless, Greek migration to small-town America is the most original and important aspect of Beck's study.While Beck and her sister appear to have successfully rejuvenated the family business in Tuscola after a thirty-year absence, this is not the case in most small towns across the Midwest, if not the United States. Growing up in a northern Illinois small town and working in retail management from the 1970s to the early 2000s, I have personally witnessed this demise many times over. While opening stores and malls during the 1980s and 1990s, I observed downtown businesses similar to Beck's in Tuscola pay the price of “progress.” Moreover, just as Beck is encouraged that this dynamic may be changing with the advent of more emphasis on local economies during the last two decades, I concur based on movements generated by “farm-to-table” restaurants and other local initiatives. Beck mentioned that some of this localism resulted due to fears associated with 9/11; perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic and fears of urban unrest will add to this anxiety as people return to their hometowns in rural communities.

The presidio, the mission, and the town were characteristic features of Spanish imperial expansion in America. In the accumulation and preservation of official records, and consequently in the presentation of facts to historical investigators, the presidio was far less notable than either the mission or the civil settlement. In the study of the history of colonial Spanish America a great deal of interest and emphasis has centered upon the sites, the foundings, the efforts, and the significances of numerous missions, as well as upon the development or decline of some towns. Military institutions have received less emphasis, except in the narratives of campaigns and conquests. Increasing investigation of presidial affairs, however, is according a finer balance to the whole study of the Spanish American colonies. In the eighteenth century the Spanish colonial empire was usually more active in the work of maintenance than in that of expansion, and New Spain was the most important part of that empire. The military posts in northern New Spain contributed no little to the institutional life of the frontiers and to the problems of the governing officials in Madrid and in the City of Mexico. It is the purpose of this writing to portray many of these problems of military administration, as they were producing, early in the second quarter of that century, a program of reform which centered around the presidial inspection by Brigadier Don Pedro de Rivera

Dutch colonization and the continuing Dutch presence has constituted an uncomfortable, somewhat indigestible, lump in early American history. Modern historians have not found a congenial way to deal with the variety of societies along North America's east coast, and Dutch settlement in particular has been pushed to the periphery of historical consciousness. The two books under review here are evidence that a very welcome change is underway. Both deal with settlements, Albany and its near neighbor Schenectady, founded in Mohawk country on the frontier. David G. Hackett's The Rude Hand of Innovation discusses religion and its relation to the social order in Albany, largely through examination of institutional sources, over a broad sweep of time, 1652 to 1836. His study, invoking the theoretical perspective of Clifford Geertz and Ann Swidler, emphasizes the complexity of the interaction between religion as a cultural system and the social order, each distorting and reinforcing the other in multiple ways. Albany's Dutch merchant families maintained their ascendancy over both church and social order, gained initially through their control of the fur trade, until the American Revolution. Under their eye Albany continued its tradition of communal unity and vital religious life in the Calvinist tradition. English people and practices were absorbed and modified to fit into Albany Dutch traditions, according to Hackett. All this began to change with the prelude to the Revolution. The excluded, especially residents of English extraction, began to challenge the control of the Dutch merchants, and a new nationalism began to replace identity based

American colonists knew just two types of public buildings,churches and taverns - and drinking houses far outnumbered places of worship. At a time when drinking water supposedly endangered one's health, colonists of every rank, age, race and gender drank often and in quantity. Sharon V. Salinger offers a study of public houses and drinking throughout the mainland British colonies. Salinger explores the obvious and obscure ends that alcohol met in colonial society. Tavern patrons might engage in a heated argument about the price of wheat, debate the inspirational quality of the minister's sermon, plot political action, exchange news, offer countless toasts, or share a convivial pint with friends. Salinger also looks at the similarities and differences in the roles of drinking and tavern sociability in New England, the mid-Atlantic, the Chesapeake and the South; in small towns, cities, and the countryside; and in Anglican, Quaker and Puritan communities. Her findings challenge the prevailing view that taverns tended to break down class and gender differences. Instead, she argues they did not signal social change so much as buttress custom and encourage exclusion.

Reviewed by: A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman Benjamin Schreier (bio) A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History By Michael Hoberman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. xii + 183 pp. In one sense Michael Hoberman's short, smart, and pithy new book addresses a fairly straightforward topic: "The subject of this book is the historical relationship between the Jewish American literary imagination and the sense of place" (2). Accordingly, it sets itself a fairly straightforward task: namely, as he writes toward the book's close, "The essays in the book represent my best attempt to explore the role that the geography of North America has played in shaping the Jewish American literary imagination" (155), or, as he describes that attempt toward the book's opening, to explore "the ways in which Jewish subjects have engaged the long-standing American tendency to contemplate and experience geography as a crucible for the formation of cultural identity" (2). And yet, as we see in this last formulation, there's something more at work in Hoberman's work: critical energies more profound than merely parochially straightforward. The book's great strength—and its offering to the field—is to provide a way to de-exceptionalize Jewish American literary study; for once we recognize the role of geography in Jewish American writing, once we appreciate its "territoriality," we recognize that it shares its ground with other American writing and literatures. To understand "geography as a basis for literary and cultural continuity" is to understand Jews in America as neither "oppressed outsiders" nor "excessively complacent recipients of American privilege" (4), but rather as Americans actively engaged in experiencing and writing like other Americans. [End Page 299] This represents a critically significant—and salutary—departure from the way the field has heretofore conceptualized itself (though "taken itself for granted" is probably more accurate, at least if you ask me). One of the historicist side effects of multiculturalist pluralism in the humanities is that it's frequently easy to think of ethnicity- or identity-based literatures as more or less discrete entities—with African American literature indexed to something more or less knowable as African American experience, Queer literature indexed to something more or less knowable as Queer experience, and so forth—and it's easy as well to eschew theorizing how those various siloed experiences and symptomatic literary formations interact with, overlap, or interdetermine each other (other than, maybe, some gestures toward a minoritarian idea of oppression). In Jewish American literary study this thought-formation is often intimately bound up with, and indeed inextricable from, a foundational sense that immigration is the only real theory the field needs—that is, that Jewish American literature essentially tracks the chronologically progressive history of Jewish immigration to the United States (thus do scholars preoccupy themselves with talk of literary generations, for example, or with how temporal distance from the scene of immigration determines the contours of the literary imagination of identity). But with its focus on geography rather than immigration, A Hundred Acres of America explicitly challenges this often-unacknowledged immigration theory of Jewish American literature. As Hoberman succinctly claims in the Introduction, "This book argues that a rich and complex relationship with American geography itself, and not merely the immigrant experience, constitutes a central reference point and touchstone for the development, over the course of several centuries, of a Jewish literary consciousness in the United States" (4). In chapters on frontier writing by Jews in early America, on late nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-twentieth-century intellectuals who emphasized the Jewish presence in colonial American cities (and who therefore substantiated claims both to the "cosmopolitan and pluralistic origins of America's oldest cities" [46] and "Jewish participation in early American history" [53]), on early- to mid-twentieth-century middlebrow and middle-American Jewish writers (in which writers [End Page 300] like Edna Ferber challenge our preconceived romantic notions of regionalism by representing small towns as continuous with "other American environments" [78]), on late-twentieth-century Jewish writers' contestations of the pastoral mode, on turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury literary returns to the shtetl...

Purpose The study builds on the literature of inclusive higher education, which describes the constructs and challenges of inclusive HE. The study emphasizes the factors responsible for inequality in HE limiting fairness and social justice. The study discusses the critical aspects of inclusive HE for policy directives and new strategic actions. The study describes the essential concepts and dimensions of inclusiveness in HE which support the development of new policy directives, strategic actions at the institutional level and higher stakeholder engagement. Design/methodology/approach The study is a comprehensive review of the concept of inclusive HE. It attempts to explore the concepts of inclusive HE, its enablers and barriers based on a library search of an online database of Scopus. The research adopts the PRISMA model, an approach which is derived from healthcare studies which are inspired by a rigorous and systematic approach. Findings The findings conclude on the apprehension at the institutional policies and practices framework on accessibility, affordability and competence measurement. The study concludes country country-specific restrictions in addressing learners’ diversity and the dearth of financial support in the form of crowdfunding apart and scholarships are critical dimensions of HE, which is an unexplored area of research in higher educational studies. Practical implications Inclusive higher education (HE) advocates social justice with equal rights and opportunities for education, which has recognized the need for policies and practices to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in education. The multi-stakeholder engagement for curriculum and pedagogy development would address the challenge of diversity. Future studies can be directed at examining the campus climate and outcomes of inclusive education and devising an evaluation framework for universal inclusive HE. Originality/value The study brings out the drivers that restrict the fairness in the HE system. The paper discusses diverse literature and identifies the relevant gaps in the strategic orientation of inclusive HE. The research sets the context for understanding the concept of inclusivity in HE in totality through a comprehensive review of extant literature, which sets the direction for future policy directives to address the existing research gaps in the HE institutional framework.

Globalisation and changes in agriculture have resulted in major social changes in inland Australia. Depopulation of the inland has led many to speculate on the future of rural towns and rural people. This paper will examine population drifts from country towns to cities and from the inland to the coastal regions and, in particular, the out‐migration of young people. In doing this, the paper focuses on several small towns in central New South Wales that have been the subject of intensive study during 2000 and 2001. Drawing on analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, in‐depth interviews and focus groups with key informants and surveys with young people and their parents in small rural communities the paper will report on the loss of young people and the greater loss of young women from these areas. It is argued that this outmigration of young people is linked to the need to seek higher education and also to the loss of full‐time jobs for young people. The loss of these jobs is the result of changes in agricultural production, labour market restructuring and a withdrawal of public and private sector services.It is further argued that current reliance by governments on market based and community self‐help solutions is not enough to provide a future for rural communities. Even if economic growth occurs this will not solve the problem of loss of young people, and the greater loss of young women, nor will it address the issue of access to education and training. Rather far greater attention to human capital (access to education, training and employment), institutional capital (government and non‐government services and infrastructure) and social capital (strong networks) is needed if Australia's small rural towns are to survive and flourish.

<scp>Urban–rural</scp>justice

Managing Change to Implement Integrated Urban Water Management in African Cities

Purpose: The study aimed to examine the implication of institutional frameworks governing land tenure security in socioeconomic dynamics in the Iringa district. The study used the case of the Iringa district to investigate the institutional framework that provides implications for the governance of land tenure security in Tanzania. Methodology: The study employed phenomenography by collecting primary data from 16 key informants selected from village and district levels. Data from key informants were complemented by documentary review with perception considered deductively. Findings: Findings confirmed the existence of two principal institutional frameworks; the Land Act No. 5 of 1999 and the Village Land Act No. 4 of 1999. Nonetheless, bureaucracy, inadequate policy dissemination, and poverty emerged as primary causes of deviations in land policy implementation in the study area. This study concludes that the successful implementation of Tanzania's land policy in the Iringa District Council has significantly facilitated land tenure security through the issuance of a Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy. Establishing a robust institutional framework and clear land use rules has been central to this success. However, challenges such as complex Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy acquisition procedures, bureaucracy, inadequate policy dissemination, and prevalent poverty in rural areas have been identified as impediments. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The study was guided by Institutional Theory which describes the interaction of human beings with existing natural resources, the institution involves the regulation of formal rules from constitutions, status laws, and other legal frameworks controlling the interaction and relationship of human behavior. The study contributed to the theory by establishing the relationship between the organization and enforcement of policy and regulatory framework that governs land tenure. Also, the study recommends expanding the Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy issuance, strengthening local land administration, simplifying land use regulations, facilitating easier access to Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy especially for impoverished households, and implementing strategies to reduce bureaucracy and enhancing policy understanding at the grassroots level. These measures aim to enhance land tenure security and support sustainable development in rural communities.

As in most Canadian provinces, the vast majority of immigrants to Quebec settle in the Greater Montreal region. Fully 85 % of immigrants to Quebec chose to live in the province’s metropolis, with Quebec City attracting a distant 5 %. Only 10 % of immigrants arriving between 2010 and 2014 chose to live anywhere but these two cities (Palardy 2015, 9). But, as in most other Canadian provinces (if not to say in many destination Western countries) (Belkhodja and Vatz Laaroussi 2012), the Quebec government has identified immigrant newcomers as a potential asset for small towns and rural areas in the province that are facing population decline, a shortage of particular types of workers and an ageing population. Yet the province remains far from its objective of attracting 21 % of new immigrants (2005–2015) to settle outside of Montreal (MIDI 2013, 10). A related outcome is that many rural and small-town communities in Quebec have today come to depend on temporary foreign workers (TFWs) as the labour force for certain industries. And, while immigration has always been a factor in rural areas and small towns, there is a growing desire to attract them to settle and strengthen local communities.