Yeoman Farmers Research Articles

The Panic of 1791: Hamilton's Reports and the Rise of Faction

On December 5, 1791, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton presented to Congress his Report on the Subject of Manufactures, which proposed significant government support for nascent American industry through tariffs, subsidies, and other incentives. It seemed that Hamilton's politico-economic vision for America had substantial political momentum, yet James Madison and his circle viewed Hamilton's proposals with alarm, and a financial panic in August and September, 1791, raised new anxieties about the rapid political and economic changes occurring in the United States. In the face of these concerns, would Congress sustain its support for Hamilton's vision? Excerpt UVA-F-1783 Rev. May 21, 2020 The Panic of 1791: Hamilton's Reports and the Rise of Faction (A) On December 5, 1791, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton presented his Report on the Subject of Manufactures (Report on Manufactures) to the US Congress. Hamilton's third in a series of policy proposals, the Report on Manufactures proposed tariffs to raise revenue and protect the fledgling American manufacturing industry, provide state subsidies to grow domestic industry, and fund internal improvements such as roads and canals. Above all, Hamilton sought to strengthen the independence of the new nation, now free from economic control by foreign governments. Congress had approved Hamilton's two previous reports. To succeed in gaining the endorsement for the third, Hamilton would need to frame a compelling argument in the face of a rising faction of opponents, called Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. How should Hamilton frame his arguments? The nation's first financial crisis in August and September 1791 complicated Hamilton's task by forcing him to intervene in the fledgling US capital markets. To do so, the Treasury Department used the money from a special sinking fund to buy US notes and shares of the Bank of the United States (BUS), which had been plummeting in price. Hamilton instructed his agents to purchase the securities at par value rather than market value. This action stabilized the market and restored confidence. However, political opponents viewed Hamilton's intervention as a bailout of the speculators and financial elites whom opposition leaders like Jefferson and Madison held responsible for the crash. The fact that the United States had only recently emerged from nearly two decades of economic disruption only heightened tensions around Hamilton's Report on Manufactures. These tensions emanated from two distinct visions of American political economy. The first, championed by Jefferson and the Republicans, envisioned an agricultural empire of liberty in which virtuous yeoman farmers cultivated the means of independent competency. The second vision, advocated by Hamilton and the Federalists, saw the country as a dynamic commercial republic. Hamilton's famous reports to Congress put his vision for a modern fiscal-industrial state into a comprehensive policy plan featuring a funded national debt, a national banking system, and government support for industrial development. Needless to say, Hamilton's economic program galvanized both sides of an American polity that bore the scars of war, political division, and economic devastation. . . .

Nouveaux regards en histoire seigneuriale au Québec ed. by Benoît Grenier, Michel Morissette

Reviewed by: Nouveaux regards en histoire seigneuriale au Québec ed. by Benoît Grenier, Michel Morissette Colin M. Coates Grenier, Benoît et Michel Morissette (eds) – Nouveaux regards en histoire seigneuriale au Québec. Québec: Septentrion, 2015. Pp. 483. What images of the seigneurial regime, Jean-René Thuot asks in this volume, should we wish to preserve today? For many people outside Québec, and particularly non-historians, seigneurial tenure probably evokes an antiquated image from the distant past. If English-speakers have much notion of it, they likely conjure up the long lots spreading back from the banks of the St. Lawrence [End Page 202] and its tributaries but may fail to realize that the shapes of lots were not a required component of seigneurial tenure. Following the important works of Fernand Ouellet, Louise Dechêne, and Allan Greer, among others, historians are apt to associate the property regime with the exploitative relations of seigneurs and their tenants or censitaires. Some historians use the word “feudal” to typify the property regime, though they acknowledge the differences between practices in Québec and classic medieval systems. After the British takeover of Québec, English-speaking merchants decried seigneurial tenure, comparing it unfavourably with freehold title where in theory individuals owned their land outright with no obligations to superiors. The seigneurial requirements to pay annual dues (often including a capon), take wheat to the seigneur’s gristmill, turn over one-twelfth of the purchase price after selling the property, maybe even supply specific days of labour to the seigneur, undoubtedly appeared foreign to the archetypical British yeoman farmer. Nonetheless, some British settlers believed they could benefit from seigneurial tenure, and many British merchants and colonial officials purchased seigneuries. As Alex Tremblay Lamarche notes, by the turn of the nineteenth century, the group of seigneurs of British origin had become more diverse than previously, reflecting their “creole” identities of having been born in the colony. (With the desire to shift the focus to individual seigneurs, this collection downplays the on-going significance of religious orders, although Jessica Barthe discusses the cloistered Ursuline order’s active administration of its seigneurie of Sainte-Croix.) Despite British views concerning the backward nature of the system of tenure, it took an incredibly long time to eliminate it. In theory, the seigneurial history of Québec drew to a close in 1854. No longer did peasants have to make annual trips to the seigneur’s manor to pay their dues. But they did. Many tenants chose not to commute their obligations, as the costs of paying a notary appeared higher than the on-going need to pay the small annual sum, an amount that inflation would slowly eat away. Not until 1940 did the annual obligations to the local seigneur end, and, as Benoît Grenier shows, the prestige of former seigneurs could linger much longer. Edmond Joly de Lotbinière, who died in 2014, continued to occupy his seigneurial pew in the church of Saint-Louis de Lotbinière during his summer visits. Although the authors do not develop this theme, some features of seigneurial tenure survive: some agrarian commons near Berthierville still are used for grazing livestock today. This collection of articles provides important reflections on the persistence of the seigneurial tenure. It originates from two key sites of production, Benoît Grenier’s seminars at the Université de Sherbrooke and Alain Laberge’s students at the Université Laval. The chapters in this volume explore a number of key topics that advance our understanding of seigneurial tenure in Québec and bordering territories. The collection is divided into three sections focusing on seigneurial property, the seigneurs themselves, and the memory and persistence of seigneurialism. By complicating any facile views of the meaning and longevity of seigneurial tenure, this collection fully reaches its goal. One of its key features is the shift in focus away from the French regime to the period after the British [End Page 203] Conquest. In some ways, British control, with the legal complications involved in the change in regime, may have extended some seigneurial practices and indeed opened up new opportunities. Two chapters by David Gilles and...

Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South by Timothy J. Williams (review)

INTELLECTUAL MANHOOD: University, Self, and Society in Antebellum South. By Timothy J. Williams. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2015.For much of past generation historical discussions of southern identity were dominated by late Eugene D. Genovese, a Marxian scholar who argued that sectional differences were rooted in aristocratic, seigneurial, and pre-bourgeois outlook of region's large planters. Involving as it did a stark repudiation of Charles Sellers's thesis that southerners shared basic American values and felt guilt over slavery, and Stanley M. Elkins's argument that American slavery reflected dynamics of unopposed capi- talism, Genovese's position went largely unchallenged until 1982 when James Oakes's book The Ruling Race refocused attention on internal diversity of southern slave owners, few of whom met criteria to be called planters and some of whom became educated professionals. Unlike Genovese, Oakes argued that small slaveholders imbibed larger acquisitive and democratic ethos that fueled westward expansion throughout America. Oakes's book was a tacit invitation to reopen discussions about yeoman farmers and urban and industrial sectors of southern society, subjects that had lain largely dormant since work of Frank L. Owsley in 1950s and Richard C. Wade, Robert S. Starobin, and others in 1960s.In his highly original study of antebellum male at university of North Carolina, Timothy Williams adds fresh depth and new dimensions to ongoing debate over sectional identity. The book advances three major propositions. First, that principal concern of University of North Carolina (UNC) students was transition to manhood rather than regional identity. A second closely related theme is that the individual formed main focus of student consciousness. Finally, and most important, Williams finds that focus on self was consistent with middle class or bourgeois culture (2) that increasingly typified antebellum America.Evidence for these assertions comes mainly from a study of University's informal curriculum as revealed in student letters and diaries together with a detailed analysis of some eight-hundred speeches delivered by members of UNC's Dialectic and Philanthropic literary societies. In an unprecedented research effort, Williams compiled a data base of some four-thousand questions debated by two groups, material that fills some twenty-seven bound volumes. These sources reveal a sustained antebellum concern with maturation (manhood defined against boyhood rather than with reference to feminine qualities), self-improvement, and a romantic view of individual self's heroic potential (11). Student orators sought to emulate Demosthenes, seen as classical archetype of manly, muscular speaker (87).Through a careful analysis of geographic, occupational, and economic backgrounds of UNC students, Williams challenges assumption that University was an elite institution catering primarily to sons of wealthy planters. …

The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston

Reviewed by: The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston Jenny Barker Devine (bio) The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America. By James L. Huston. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. vii, 345. $47.50 cloth) Most historians agree that the emergence of free-labor principles in the 1850s and regional divisions along economic lines fueled sectional antagonism leading to the Civil War. Narratives crafted by historians Eugene D. Genovese, Eric Foner, and others have described how an urban, industrial North outpaced an antiquated, agrarian South. Historian James L. Huston takes this interpretation to task in The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America, by arguing that the sectional crisis was actually rooted in rural America, where concepts of land use and ownership created very different societies in the North and South. Southern planters emulated the landed, leisured British aristocracy, seeking large holdings that relied on a subjugated (enslaved) labor force. Northern family farms, on the other hand, required small parcels of land, a family workforce, and the services [End Page 250] of independent, small-town merchants and artisans. These systems created vastly different societies that each hoped to replicate in the West, giving rise to tensions over slavery and landownership. Huston’s highly readable narrative opens by explaining the evolution of the British landholding system and the eventual triumph of the landed estate in the wake of the English Civil War. The gentry created a social system that eschewed manual labor and upheld leisure as an ideal. As leaders, they believed their time was best spent on education, politics, the arts, and the “mastery” of commanding subordinates (p.11). Their hunger for land compromised a dwindling yeomanry and middle class that adhered to Puritan doctrines of achieving moderate, sustainable livelihoods. Huston’s transnational approach takes a much longer view of landownership and explains how British colonizers transferred this conflict to North America. In the colonies, however, an abundance of land and resources, as well as the introduction of African slavery, allowed for family farms and plantations to flourish simultaneously in different regions. In constructing his argument, Huston pays careful attention to settlement patterns, geography, and climate, taking into consideration the suitability of the North to grains and livestock and the South to commercial crops such as cotton and tobacco. Ultimately, though, Huston argues that landholding patterns are a “man-made determination,” and here is where readers will want to focus their attention (p. 131). Recounting decades of historiography, he argues that southern planters “ruined the chances of the small farmers to obtain land,” and he provides persuasive evidence through a quantitative comparison of land use within congressional districts (p. 131). He takes this argument a step further by adamantly asserting that the sectional crisis was purely a dispute over landownership and that the growth of industry should be removed from the equation entirely. After all, the politicians who crafted the endless compromises related to slavery and westward expansion, including David Wilmot and Stephen A. Douglas, represented rural districts. Huston goes so far as to say: “the obsession of historians with urbanization and industrialization has [End Page 251] had a warping influence on the understanding of American history prior to 1880” (pp. 212–13). Huston neglected to take into account the growing literature on yeoman farmers in the South, as well as the growth of commercial agriculture, mining, cattle, and timber industries in rural areas that fueled the growth of urban industrialization. This complicates the story because, in many ways, the lines between industry and agriculture are not as distinctive as Huston portrays them. Nonetheless, The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer demonstrates that the causes of the American Civil War are far from resolved. Huston’s call to reconsider the rural nature of the sectional crisis introduces new life into an old debate and his conclusions warrant further investigation at the federal, state, and local levels. Jenny Barker Devine JENNY BARKER DEVINE teaches history at Illinois College in...

Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West by Jason E. Pierce

Reviewed by: Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West by Jason E. Pierce Michael Phillips Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West. By Jason E. Pierce. (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2016. Pp. 312. Illustrations, bibliography, index.) In his skillful synthesis, Jason Pierce explores the myriad hopes and fears “white” elites projected upon the American West. Beginning with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, educated Anglos saw conflicting potential futures for the United States as they gazed at the lands beyond the Mississippi River. Some thought they saw a fertile paradise that guaranteed Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a republic built on the labor of free white yeoman farmers not beholden to corrupt Eastern money interests. Others feared that the West represented a dangerous trap: a tempting land that supposedly would poison Anglo-Saxons with Latin lethargy. “A salubrious climate could be detrimental to racial vigor, and indeed, early Anglo American visitors saw proof of the dangers of a pleasant climate in the allegedly lazy Indians and Hispanics of California and the Southwest,” Pierce says of writers like Richard Henry Dana (52). Finally, another set of thinkers perceived the West as an escape valve allowing “real” Americans (of Western and Northern European heritage) to escape filthy, crowded Atlantic seaboard cities infested with “lesser white” immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Nineteenth-century elites debated whether Anglo-Saxons had been created to thrive only in climates similar to their Northern European homeland and thus faced a natural barrier when they reached what was once called the “Great American Desert,” or whether their supposed superiority suited them to dominate any landscape. Meanwhile, conflicting schemes hatched to exploit the West as a racial dumping ground where American Indians and free African Americans could be exiled from the white-dominated East, even as railroads promoted the Northern European immigration to the western lands they offered for sale. Pierce’s work relies heavily on the innovative analyses of David Roediger and Richard Slotkin. His innovation is in laying out a clear chronology on how the West evolved as a racial project. He effectively uses the [End Page 395] colorful lives and brusque words of writers Charles Fletcher Lummis and Frank Bird Linderman, who both promoted white settlement of the West, to illustrate that evolution. Lummis in particular is a case study of the incoherence of nineteenth-century racial thought, advocating both white racial conquest of the West and protection of the indigenous people and their way of life. Also fascinating is his examination of how Mormons, because of their unconventional attitudes towards polygamy, came to be racialized as inferior whites. This exclusion from whiteness drips with irony given that the Mormons supported slavery and until the late nineteenth century excluded those of African descent from the priesthood because of the so-called Curse of Ham, which marked them forever to be “servants unto servants.” Pierce devotes much of one chapter to the use of violence to draw racial boundaries between whites and American Indians and Mexicans in Texas. Overall, this work is of great use to scholars of Texas history, the West, and the changing meaning of white identity. Michael Phillips Collin College Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 by Claudio Saunt (review)

Reviewed by: West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 by Claudio Saunt Andrew Kettler (bio) West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776. By Claudio Saunt. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. Pp. 304. $26.95 cloth) Colin Calloway’s The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995) and Elizabeth Fenn’s Pox Americana (2001) explored connections between the American Revolution and the American West. Fenn highlighted how the Revolution exacerbated the transmission of smallpox. For Calloway, it changed the patterns of Native American alliances and led to the internal disruption of many Native American communities. Claudio Saunt also writes about the American West during the 1770s, but his purpose is manifestly to show how it was not influenced by the American Revolution. Answering Alan Taylor’s important call for colonial history beyond the original thirteen in American Colonies (2001), Saunt’s history searches western accounts from the 1770s for their own historical merit of the actors involved, rather than for relationships to the Revolution. Similar to Fenn’s Encounters at the Heart of the World (2014), Saunt’s work highlights a recent trend in New Indian history that explores Native American communities during the Revolutionary era as those societies viewed their own political positions, despite the famous historical events happening to their east. Saunt uses winter counts, Spanish diplomatic archives, and colonial correspondence to undermine the traditional narrative of 1776, which overlooks the history of the early American West in favor of the deceptively iconic past of Washington, Jefferson, and Paine. Saunt’s amply illustrated West of the Revolution is consequently an accessible investigation to remedy discrepancies in popular memory, rather than an exceedingly academic analysis like his still-essential examination of generational disputes among the Creek as they confronted altered market relations in A New Order of Things (1999). Saunt explores the history of speculators in Appalachia on the eve of the Revolution. He highlights the history of Richard Henderson over-ambitiously shooting the Cumberland Gap in the spring of 1775 to disrupt the historiographical ideal of American individualism and the [End Page 733] Jeffersonian tradition of the yeoman farmer. West of these well-known environs, Saunt explores distant histories of first encounters between Native Americans and Europeans three hundred years after Columbus. Triggered by Spanish fears of Russian intrusion upon the North American fur trade during the 1760s, Spanish explorers ventured beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevadas for the first time, founding the San Francisco presidio in the late summer of 1776. Russians are fundamental to Saunt’s history. For example, he analyzes Captain Ivan Solov’ev’s brutal expansion into Aleut fur trade networks to feed the intensive demand for otter, fox, and beaver furs in Chinese markets. Russian trading, Spanish imperial policy, and continued French and English hunting caused the demise of myriad North American species during this era of transition to European ecological imperialism. These European rivalries and their effects on ecology are vital to Saunt’s history, but his most exciting achievements in West of the Revolution are his functional narratives of Native America, which make the ruthless repression of the Kumeyaay Revolt of 1775, the Lakota Sioux migration to the Black Hills under the leadership of Standing Bull, the rise of the Osage Empire after the Treaty of Paris of 1763, and Creek attempts at opening trade with Spanish Cuba in 1775 accessible to a wide audience. West of the Revolution may be just the cure we need for the syndrome within American popular memory that remembers 1775 in the twenty miles between Boston and Concord. [End Page 734] Andrew Kettler ANDREW KETTLER is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of South Carolina. He researches cross-cultural sensory encounters in the North American borderlands. Copyright © 2015 Kentucky Historical Society

Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada ed. by Adele Perry, Esyllt W. Jones, and Leah Morton (review)

Reviewed by: Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada ed. by Adele Perry, Esyllt W. Jones, and Leah Morton Frances W. Kaye Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada. Edited by Adele Perry, Esyllt W. Jones, and Leah Morton. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2013. 329 pp. Notes, index. $34.95 paper. Place and Replace is a collection of papers presented at a joint meeting of the St. John’s College Prairies Conference and Western Canadian Studies in Winnipeg in 2010. All of them focus on the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, but they come from many different disciplines, including Indigenous studies, history, literature, political science, community planning, and geography. None of the authors formally specifies “region,” but all deal implicitly, usually explicitly, with place. Race, ethnicity, and gender are also central issues in eleven of the sixteen articles. Sarah Carter’s essay on “Homestead Rights of First Nations Farmers” begins the volume on a useful, if depressing, note, describing the tortured thinking necessary to prevent Native farmers and families from taking up homesteads. The contrast between the white yeoman farmers and families turning wasteland into the breadbasket for the world and the savage Indigenous hunters and gatherers was only maintained by merciless government prevention of Native agriculture. In looking again at the Murdoch v. Murdoch case and its denial of any right to land by a wife who had invested both her own capital and her own labor directly into building up a family farm, Pernille Jakobsen undercuts the myth of the Prairies as the home of Canadian women’s rights. Although this is a Canadian collection, American Great Plains readers will also be aware of the strength and dubious authenticity of these myths in the United States. Joyce M. Chadya’s look at the Zimbabwean diaspora in the Prairies and its response to funerals is a wonderful insight into 21st-century immigration. Far from the “emigrant cars” of the 19th and early 20th century, immigration from the Global South to Canada depends on planes, cell phones, and electronic money transfers. Cather’s Shimerda family certainly had no such ease of connection—and hence no such sense of obligation to the old country. Alison Calder points out that much Canadian prairie literary study has not followed historians into the intellectual frameworks of decolonization, and although George Melnyk’s work with Alberta literature provides counterexamples, her questions and her directions toward a study beyond old myths are useful. Lindy Ledohowski also writes back to the critics, emphasizing the power and noncompliance of the “Baba” figures who have generally been oversimplified as rustic grandmamas. Two of the more innovative articles are Sterling Evans’s history of Dinosaur Provincial Park and Beverly A. Sandalack’s study of prairie towns as they morph from their early mainstreet-and-railroad forms, dominated by grain elevators and their false-fronted echoes, to their current decentralized and deregionalized highway strip malls and residential cul-de-sacs. Not an anthology with a few coherent themes, this is a more angular collection that is full of useful information both for scholars of the Great Plains in any discipline and for general readers. Frances W. Kaye English and Ethnic Studies University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston. By Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) 257 pp. $34.95 cloth and e-book

Robert Love’s Warnings examines the operation of the poor law in Boston. The city’s selectmen hired “warners,” such as Love, to search for newcomers and warn them to leave. Strangers could stay and seek employment, but if they needed relief, the colony would have to pay for it. The book provides biographical sketches of those people whom Love warned. Love, who searched Boston’s streets for transients and recent arrivals, left detailed accounts of strangers’ names, birthplaces, last habitation, occupation, Boston residence, and the number of people in their party by age and sex. The biographical sketches are based on Love’s records and its nominal linkage to other sources that uncover the lives of those warned.The book sustains George Ravenstein’s “Laws of Migration,” as revised by twentieth-century demographers. Just as in late nineteenth-century England, most of the migrants in Dayton and Salinger’s research had moved a short distance, in this case relocating to Boston; nearly all of them came from New England. Boston received more migrants than any other New England town, but most of them left soon after arrival, usually for the countryside—a common final destination in the early modern world.A number of them came in search of opportunities in domestic service, desperately in need of wages sufficient to feed and clothe themselves and their families. The authors argue, however, that Boston’s migrants were primarily from the middling sort—yeoman farmers and artisans. Their classification of only one-fifth of those whom Love warned as poor challenges earlier historians’ insistence that nearly all of those warned were poor. But the story is more complicated. The book presents enough compelling data to challenge its own conclusions. Boston migrants certainly included a substantial number of the middling sort. But this group probably did not constitute four-fifths of the strangers entering the town. Love includes travelers (both poor and middling) who came to Boston by sea or by land, planning to leave immediately for elsewhere. But he excludes two groups traditionally considered poor—sailors, a constant and large portion of Boston’s population, who fell under the jurisdiction of a ship’s captain, and British occupying soldiers, who were the responsibility of their officers.The operation of the Massachusetts Poor Law compounds these problems. Love probably identified nearly all of the absolutely destitute strangers in Boston. After all, the selectmen wanted him to locate those most likely to need public assistance. But many of the others that he warned were probably among the working poor—young female domestic servants, wage laborers, or journeymen artisans down on their luck—a group that the authors combine with the middling sort.Boston’s population never reached 20,000 before the American Revolution. Yet it attracted thousands of strangers during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Even during the severe recession following the Seven Years’ War, migrants continued to arrive. As New England’s largest town and entrepôt, Boston played a vital role in New England’s economy, attracting apprentices and domestic servants, as well as those without visible means of support. The turnover was great. Those who came for only a few months or years, expecting to return to their home villages or move to a growing frontier, were replaced by a steady stream of new migrants.Robert Love’s Warnings adds much to early American history, the history of American and global poverty, and the study of law and public welfare. Its thick description of the lives of poor people and of struggling workers humanizes a mostly unknown part of the colonial population and sheds some light on how the early United States dealt with the problems of internal migration and immigration.

‘A Bad Lot’: Local Politics and the Survey of Oxkraal and Kamastone, 1853-1923

ABSTRACTThe large Fingo reserve areas of Oxkraal and Kamastone in the Queenstown Division were the site of significant social change and colonial efforts at spatial engineering in order to guide the area from communities under chiefs and hereditary headmen into landscapes with blocks of yeoman farmers and surplus labourers. From the 1850s onward, the area was a target for such efforts, which centred on the survey and titling of finite parcels to individual households. However, local communities, extant Fingo authorities, and various individuals sought to modify the project before it could be carried out, and they worked to circumvent its more onerous aspects afterwards. The relationship between the state and the Oxkraal and Kamastone communities shows both the fixations of the former and the resilient adaptability of the latter, a combination that exposes the limits of each in controlling the changing context of colonial interventions.

From disaster to sustainability: floods, changing property relations and water management in the south-western Netherlands, c.1500–1800

ABSTRACTWhen large parts of the south-western Netherlands flooded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the main cause was insufficient maintenance of the sea defences. The subsequent re-embankment of the polders resulted in changes to both soil conditions and property relations in the region. The Church and the local peasants lost land and members of the urban bourgeoisie became the most important landowners. Unlike their risk-averse predecessors, these capitalist landlords were prepared to invest in drainage. They were also able to organise state support for those polders that were at risk of flooding. Tenant and yeomen farmers had an equally important role as they maintained the fertility of the soil and were prepared to invest in the upkeep of the flood defences.

McNeill’s Rangers in the Public Memory of Hardy County, West Virginia

McNeill’s Rangers in the Public Memory of Hardy County, West Virginia Richard A. Hulver This article uses the McNeill’s Rangers of Hardy County, West Virginia, as a case study that demonstrates the difficulty of interpreting the past of a divided public. The McNeill’s Rangers were a group of partisan Confederate soldiers who, using Hardy County as their main headquarters, fought a guerrilla war against the Union. Following the war, a heroic memory developed within Hardy County, due in part to the rangers, and their supporters, actively reporting their own version of the war. The heroic memory dominated early histories of the rangers and still exists today. In the late 1930s, the state of West Virginia placed a wayside marker in Moorefield, West Virginia, commemorating the rangers. This marker perpetuates the heroic memory and fails to place the rangers within broader context of guerrilla war or Civil War memory. The following article will place Hardy County in its historic context, briefly explain the service of the McNeill’s Rangers in the Civil War, demonstrate how initial memories of the rangers were formed, and discuss contemporary efforts to revise these early romanticized interpretations. Place: Hardy County, West Virginia Those who take ownership of history greatly influence that history. History of place, local demographics, culture, and popular memories are influences that persistently work on a history. Hardy County, West Virginia, is located in the eastern portion of the state and borders Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Much of its culture and economy is connected toward places outside West Virginia. The South Branch of the Potomac River flows through the county, creating a fertile farming valley primarily centered on livestock and grain production. Areas of the county east and west of the South Branch Valley are more mountainous and remote. The agriculture industry, primarily poultry farming, remains the predominant industry in Hardy County today. Poultry farmers throughout the region send their livestock to large processing and distribution plants in Rockingham County, Virginia, and in Moorefield, Hardy County’s [End Page 21] seat. As of 2013, the population of Hardy County stands slightly under two-million people—95 percent white, 3.5 percent Latino, and 2.9 percent African American.1 Significant numbers of Moorefield’s minority groups provide labor to poultry plants.2 Today’s diverse geography and economy of Hardy County also influenced its historical trajectory. Hardy County played a critical, yet understudied role in the Civil War and West Virginia’s contested statehood. Large, fertile tracts of land within the South Branch Valley fostered farms labored on by slaves, which, on the eve of the Civil War, were just less than ten percent of the county’s population.3 Wealthy landowners in the region, who dominated the politics of the county, used slave labor to tend to crops and large cattle herds through the Revolutionary and antebellum eras. Yeomen farmers in the mountainous regions tended their smaller farms primarily with the labor of family and neighbors. When war came to Hardy County, the population had divided loyalties. Some supported the planter class and slave system of Old Virginia, while others remained loyal to the Union. The area remained predominately pro-Confederate throughout the war, but citizens took up arms for both armies. The abundant agricultural resources offered by the South Branch Valley made it a location coveted by both the Union and Confederacy. Additionally, its close proximity to important cities in the Shenandoah Valley gave Hardy County strategic and logistic value. Residents of Hardy County regularly saw armies of both the Union and Confederacy inhabit their towns, confiscate their property, and harass enemies. They lived among violence, and often fought among themselves depending on their loyalties. Nationally, the county was removed from the United States and became a part of the Confederacy in the first stages of the war. Then, it was stripped from Virginia and returned to the Union through what many residents would consider an illegitimate West Virginia. Locally, citizens of the county remained split between the planter mentality and pro-Union sympathizers.4 After the war, the very pro-Union western portion of the county became Grant County, named for the famed Union general. Reporting the basic...

Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico

Deborah Cohen theorizes and documents Mexican workers in the United States in the mid-twentieth century as complex transnational and gendered agents acted upon by two governments but also acting on their own behalf for various reasons. Her analysis offers the most complicated view yet of these workers in the World War II and Korean War eras, part of a growing movement to capture these men’s stories, which are increasingly becoming unavailable.Cohen positions her narrative between those black-and-white analyses of the bracero program as either exploitation or opportunity; her account is rather one containing nuanced voices. The book focuses on the multiple stakeholders, expectations, and rationalized agendas of nations, interest groups, and individuals involved with the program. She builds national, transnational, and supranational themes as they intersect with individual workers, their families, and their communities. Located within these multiple discourses is the Mexican worker, neither a victim nor a martyr but a historical agent perhaps hoping to gain wealth, occasionally a war hero, or a transnational spouse and father taking a chance on working in the United States.The book is structured around three unofficial phases of the bracero program: 1942–1947, 1948–1951, and 1951–1964 and its legacy. Cohen’s analysis of the diplomatic rhetoric and agendas of the two nations is superb, highlighting the irony of the Mexican government touting the modernizing effects the program would have on the country through workers returning from the United States with new technological skills, competencies that they were often denied as growers favored braceros serving as hand workers. Instead, the little technological access and modernization received by Mexico came from the individual consumption and products braceros brought back from the United States. The Mexican government’s goal of elevating the country through exposure to returning mexicanos, while perhaps more symbolic and discursive than anything, did not preclude braceros from being agents of change for their home families and communities, as Cohen aptly demonstrates in her interviews with many returning workers. She also documents the costs of the program to transnational bracero families, particularly to women and children left in Mexico, not just the benefits of returned income and goods.The US government and agribusiness sectors had their own goals and narratives. Cohen excels at explaining the rhetoric by which US farmers positioned themselves as Jeffersonian models of self-sufficiency, which masked the massive governmental aid they received, of which braceros were a part. Growers also presented themselves as beleaguered businessmen, national heroes during two wars who desperately needed help. Yet, in reality, by 1940, 50 percent of the nation’s food was grown on less than 10 percent of its farms; one-third of farmworkers labored on less than 3 percent of the farms. The mythic image of the yeoman farmer as a small businessman trying to scrape by was just that, mythic, and it shaped the trajectory of the bracero program and the treatment of the men coming from Mexico.Cohen also details how the individual worker fared within both these larger themes of modernization in Mexico and salvation in the United States. As other scholars have, Cohen describes the hurdles and processes for selection into the program from the Mexican side, but she highlights better than any previous researcher the role the United States played in manipulating workers in Mexico through selective opening of the border or the use of Operation Wetback. Again, the strength of Cohen’s work lies in those sections that describe the need for applying workers to appear to be Indian and in need of modernization in order to be selected, or that chronicle the attempts by the US government and social service agencies to control men and their bodies. Both sides attempted to circumscribe bracero agency as individuals in favor of a broader national agenda.The book concludes with critical analysis of contemporary guest-worker issues such as the H-2A provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act or missing bracero pensions from over a half-century ago. Cohen effectively predates and predicts the contemporary immigration and guest-worker debate due to her profound understanding of these historical policies and discourses. These “ambassadors in overalls” (p. 251) were suspect in the eyes of their countrymen for leaving and in the eyes of US residents for coming. This distrust prevented workers on either side of the border from finding common cause with braceros, a lesson that still resonates in the present as competing interests once again politicize, imagine, and rhetoricize another transnational labor agreement.

The Celebrity of Salatin: Can a Famous Lunatic Farmer Change the Food System?

This essay analyzes Joel Salatin’s celebrity as a sustainable farmer to explore the ways his public persona manages underlying tensions in the alterative food movement. Using his many film appearances as well as ethnographic notes from a full day workshop with Salatin as data, this paper explores how Salatin’s celebrity status obscures many of the challenges facing food activists behind the veneer of the charming, folksy farmer and the rhetoric of freedom (freedom from the corporate food system and corrupt government practices). The tensions between Salatin’s free-market, anti-regulation politics and the mainstream environmental movement, we argue, are managed and contained through nostalgic images of Salatin as the white, male, yeoman farmer and the masculinization of sustainability. By using an appeal to traditional masculinities to market sustainable food to the mainstream, Salatin’s celebrity (like all celebrity identities) works to support consumption and market-driven solutions to current environmental and food justice crises. In the process, these solutions ignore how the market itself is culpable in creating such crises. By obscuring this tautology, Salatin’s celebrity suggests we can consume our way out of the injustices of the current food system.

A Producers' Republic: Rural Zoning, Land Use, and Citizenship in the Great Lakes Cutover, 1920–1940

THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 40:1 (Spring 2014): 1-26© 2014 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved A Producers’ Republic: Rural Zoning, Land Use, and Citizenship in the Great Lakes Cutover, 1920-1940 by Joshua Nygren On September 4, 1933, well-known agricultural economist George S. Wehrwein hit the AM airwaves out of Madison, Wisconsin, to demonstrate the common-sense virtues of a new movement in land-use planning: rural zoning. In an effort to illustrate the concept to his audience, Wehrwein used the following “homely illustration”: In winter, pa likes to grease the harness in the house where it is warm. But ma says, ‘All right, pa, you can grease the harness in the house but you must do it in the kitchen.’ And when she can make that stick, she has zoned the house! And we will all agree that when there is a place for everything, and everything is done in its proper place, we will have efficient political economy as well as efficient domestic economy.1 Rural zoning in the Great Lakes countryside applied principles similar to urban zoning by creating districts dedicated solely to agriculture, forestry, recreation, and tourism. As was the case for the once forested cutover lands in Michigan and Minnesota, Wehrwein’s northern Wisconsin had experienced a host of problems since World War I: a depressed agricultural market, widespread tax delinquency, and rising per-capita costs for public schools and roads. Trained experts of Wehrwein’s ilk thought these problems were rooted in a socially backward rural populace and an equally outdated system of land use. In between the two world wars, prevailing ideals of citizenship in the Great Lakes cutover seemed increasingly defunct. The area had 1 George S. Wehrwein, “Why Do We Need to Zone Land?” Transcript of radio program, September 4, 1933, Box 18, Folder 3, George Simon Wehrwein Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society [hereafter Wehrwein Papers]. Wehrwein’s emphasis. 2 The Michigan Historical Review witnessed vast deforestation during the second half of the nineteenth century, and as lumber companies vacated the region they left in their wake millions of acres of stump-riddled lands. Few in fin de siècle America questioned that this region should be put to farming and populated by the paragons of nineteenth-century rural citizenship—yeoman farmers. According to Jeffersonian tradition and mythology, these farmers represented the backbone of the republic, as their individualism and independence from outside forces guarded against corruption and ensured a well-functioning democracy. 2 In the twentieth-century Great Lakes cutover, however, many yeoman farms yielded meager harvests and faced major hardships, leading to farm failures and isolated settlements where many farmers had hoped thriving communities would develop.3 Families remaining in the cutover still required costly services, such as public schooling and road maintenance, and with dwindling population and income these could not be fully subsidized. As a result, county and state budgets became burdened by farm abandonment and tax delinquency. Agricultural economists and other experts who surveyed the situation blamed unwise land use for generating these conditions—especially the sorts of unplanned, “haphazard” land use they considered typical of the individualistic yeoman farmer. Once a strength, the “rugged individualism” of the frontier had apparently 2 In the past two decades, the study of citizenship has become an integral component of US social history. For example, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and “In Pursuit of Economic Citizenship,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 10 (Summer 2003): 157-175; Kim Cary Warren, The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 3 The classic treatments of nineteenth-century deforestation in the Great Lakes region are Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially 193-237 and William Cronon...

“No Backward Step”: Slavery and Freedom in Multiple Contexts

No Backward Step: Slavery and Freedom in Multiple Contexts RIVER OF DARK DREAMS: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. By Walter Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2013.THE LONG, LINGERING SHADOW: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere. By Robert J. Cottrol. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2013.ENVISIONING EMANCIPATION: Black Americans and the End of Slavery. By Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2013.BEYOND REDEMPTION: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War. By Carole Emberton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013.For over a century, there has been a plethora of studies that consider slavery and emancipation. In the midst of the Civil War sesquicentennial, scholars are challenging old assumptions and grappling with new theories concerning the peculiar institution. Even Hollywood entered into the debate with its adapta- tion of Solomon Northup's personal account of kidnapping and enslavement in 12 Years a Slave (2013). This essay considers four recent studies on the subject matter. Two of the works are grounded in the United States' system of slavery, with one venturing a comparative approach that contrasts the system in North America with primarily Spanish-speaking nations to its south. Through photo- graphs, another study considers the long process of emancipation in the United States. last illustrates how the language of redemption was appropriated by-for often vastly different reasons-Radical Republicans, southern white supremacists, and freed people.In River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Walter Johnson commences with a quote from W. E. B. DuBois. It states, The slave barons looked behind them and saw to their dismay that there could be no step. slavery of the new Cotton Kingdom in the nineteenth century either die or conquer a nation-it could not hesitate or pause. While this an appropriate introduction to Johnson's work, it is also relevant to the other three studies under review in this essay.The notion of an inability to take a backward step once the course has been charted can be used to discuss the rise of the Cotton Kingdom that fueled an international market in a single crop. It can also extend to the racial structures that grew out of slave societies in the United States and Latin America. idea that slavery must either die or conquer a can be applied to emancipation and its photographic representations. Additionally, it can capture the determina- tion of southern white supremacists that resisted the destruction of an institution that had gripped the nation for almost two hundred and fifty years.In River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson traces the rise of the Mississippi Valley Cotton Kingdom. Mississippi Valley, in Thomas Jefferson's imagin- ings, was to be a place for white yeoman farmers who headed households that practiced self-sufficiency. These white yeoman farmers would occupy a vast land mass far removed from cities. This reality would force them to provide for themselves and their families. They would eschew the debtor-creditor relationship and their distance from factories would prevent a dependence on wage labor. In order to make way for this isolated white man's utopia, the federal govern- ment engaged in actions that subjugated and removed Native Americans from their newly acquired territory. By doing so, Jefferson's vision of producing the landscape where white men were masters of their own destiny could become a reality. In this empire of liberty, white men would reproduce families opposed to a commodity for the national or international marketplace.However, Jefferson's vision never took hold in the Mississippi Valley. Speculators descended upon the territory and purchased land meant for first-time buyers. This effectively transformed Jefferson's ideal of an empire for liberty. …

Michael James Vendy Bull

Michael James Vendy Bull was born at Waterstock in Oxfordshire. The elder son of a yeoman farmer, he was educated at Lord Williams’ Grammar School, Thame, then at St Edward’s...

Revising the Southern Myth: Persephone Violated in Faulkner’s Sanctuary and McCarthy’s Child of God

Faulkner' Journal Chad M. Jewett Revising the Southern Myth: Persephone Violated in Faulkner’s Sanctuary and McCarthy’s Child of God N urtured by the neoclassicism of Thomas Jefferson and the classics education ofearly Southern colleges, the mythology ofthe South has been marked by a distinctly Hellenic imagery. The agrarian South­ ern mystique, based on the classical ethos of the agricultural calen­ dar and a yeoman closeness to the land, established an undercurrent of ancient Greco-Roman imagery throughout the Souths artistic production and cultural sensibility well into the twentieth century. Indeed, several contributors to I’ll Take My Stand (1930), the Agrarians’ programmatic compilation ofessays, note a predilection for classical ethos and imagery as a key facet of Southern excep­ tionalism. The seasonal calendar may have been historically adapted to Christs birth and passion, but the myth of the agricultural cycle, to many Southern in­ tellectuals, was steeped in the classical. The Southern idealization of the classics rose throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to Wayne K. Durrill, Southern promotion of the classics was intended to “produce a coherent ruling elite in a developing plantation society” in which classical education “qualified students for member­ ship in a very select group” (470, 471). As John Hardin Best notes, education in the classics became a way for the elite to assert their status and to “hold in place generations of a lower-class white population” through the cultivation of an exclusive culture (49). The classical sensibility persisted in the New South, enhanced by the privilege ofeducation at schools like Ole Miss. The genteel dif­ ferentiation of the Agrarians, based at the elite Vanderbilt University (itselfthe site ofa respected classics department), could easily be seen as indulging in this sort ofgentlemens club ofclassical affectation. The idealization ofclassical ethos is central to the agrarian program, which centered the South on the Hellenic yeoman farmer of Jefferson’s imaginings. The agrarian movement ofthe 1920s reasserted this marriage of the South with Hellenic agricultural values and became a template for some important Southern novels during and after the Southern Renaissance, such as William Faulkners Sanctuary (1931) and Cormac McCarthy’s Child ofGod (1973). These two works are especially salient as Faulkners novel comes at the beginning of a Southern transformation (from rural to town based, from New South to newer South, from populist to solidly conservative), of which McCarthy depicts the 77 78 Chad M. Jewett Persephone Violated in Faulkner and McCarthy stark conclusion. In the case ofboth Faulkner and McCarthy, Hellenic imagery is used for acerbic parody of the pretensions attached to these classical arche­ types, specifically the Hellenic seasonal myths.1 The precedent of the agrarian ethos, and its apparent distaste for and sublimation ofSouthern realities, is pur­ sued and assailed in Sanctuary and Child ofGod. Faulkner takes these imagin­ ings at their word, resetting Yoknapatawpha as a stage for Greek myth and the novel’s characters as figures in the Persephone legend. McCarthy adopts and alters the Hellenic pastoral, juxtaposing the beauty of the Tennessee woods with the violent Hades he inserts there. Both novels adapt thematic elements of the Hellenic Persephone-Hades myth, in which a precedent for the agricultural seasons of ancient Greece is established. Faulkner uses this Persephone archetype to two ends. The author marks the moral distance between the rural South (and its tenants) and the town-bound aristocrats who cling to the old Arcadian images. Faulkner bases his satire on the aristocratic icon of the Southern white woman as well as the Grecian acropolis ofthe Southern town, focusing on the upper-class hypocrisy and willful ignorance of the growing violence and discord of the New South hidden behind this neoclassical facade. McCarthy, an heir to Faulkner in both style and subject, presents a harsher, more radical version of Faulkner’s Perse­ phone myth, devoted to a stark appraisal of New Southern dispossession from the land. McCarthy steeps his classical novel in a satire of sacred violence and native chivalry that W. J. Cash posits as a traditional characteristic ofthe Appa­ lachian backwoods, itself another Southern Arcadia, that provides the setting for Child ofGod (73). Indeed, McCarthy’s ambiguous Southernness is answered by the overtly Southern concerns...

Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860 (review)

Reviewed by: Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860 Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch (bio) Keywords South, Markets, Southern economy, Slavery Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860. Edited by Susanna Delfino, Michele Gillespie, and Louis M. Kyriakoudes. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. Pp. 270. Paper $40.00.) In the last decades of the twentieth century, traditional histories of the antebellum South described the region as economically stagnant and [End Page 530] socially backward. More recently, however, new scholarship has brought to light the pervasiveness of market activities in the Old South. Southern Society and Its Transformations builds on this new body of scholarship and makes important contributions of its own. This volume of essays paints a picture of a dynamic South that was constantly evolving and adapting (12). In addition to the preface and editors’ introduction, the book’s nine essays are broken up into four sections that examine race relations, the emergence of the market economy, the rise of a southern middle class, and finance. The essays relocate the origins of regional modernization in the antebellum era and suggest a different timeline and pace for capitalist expansion. The authors depict the ebb and flow of southern economic development that started out slowly in the 1830s, but then rapidly accelerated in the late 1840s and 1850s. Besides these shared contributions, the individual essays in Southern Society and Its Transformations offer three additional assertions that further complicate existing southern historiography. First, antebellum southerners were not only market-oriented, but also willing capitalists. Robert Wright’s essay surveys the economic viability of southern business and argues that southerners were not reluctant entrepreneurs. In fact, Wright demonstrates that southerners adroitly raised needed capital to finance their business ventures. He contends that southerners’ willingness to participate in the market was stifled only by the “negative externality” of slavery (198). Jeff Bremer’s chapter on the evolving consumer economy in Missouri and Gary T. Edwards’s essay on yeomen farmers’ desire to enter into surplus cotton production in western Tennessee further establish southern farmers’ willing engagement in market activities. Elbra David’s chapter on the role of unsecured credit in Natchez illustrates the adaptability of the southern credit system. Like Bremer, David demonstrates the usefulness of examining the whole range of credit relationships, including informal credit transactions that were conducted outside of formal lending channels, because of their importance to regional economic development and in financing southern agriculture. Second, the two essays by Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green trace the creation of a self-conscious middle-class identity among a growing group of educated southern professionals, and they explore the occupational diversification that accompanied economic and social change in antebellum southern life. Wells examines southern professionals’ efforts to differentiate themselves from planters by forming professional societies, clubs, and organizations. Ultimately these organizations [End Page 531] helped the emerging middle class formulate a new future for the South, one that envisioned slavery comfortably coexisting with urban and industrial modernization. Green explores the educational background of antebellum southerners, concluding that graduates of higher schooling overwhelmingly entered into middle-class professional occupations and sought professional, not agricultural, success. These essays demonstrate the growing presence of a middle-class coalition of southerners who helped to redefine southern social mobility and cultivate bourgeois values long before the Civil War. A third group of essays reveals significant tensions among white southerners. As whites increasingly engaged in market activities, their competing economic interests strained both racial solidarity and the traditional framework of the slave system. Specifically, these tensions underscored the need for nonslaveholding whites to participate in the common defense of slavery (which did not always occur). Keri Leigh Merritt’s chapter on the enforcement of vagrancy laws in antebellum Georgia exposes planters’ uncertainty about poor whites’ commitment to slavery. She argues that vagrancy laws were selectively used to punish poor whites whose allegiance they questioned. Michael J. Pfeifer’s essay highlights the surprising prevalence of extralegal lynching in the antebellum era. Like Merritt, Pfeifer uncovers interesting historical moments when the property rights of individual slaveholders were pitted against the larger community’s interest in reinforcing racial solidarity. Moreover, Max L. Grivno’s chapter on rural wage labor in Maryland...

A. J. Davis’s Belmead

In 1845 Philip St. George Cocke commissioned Alexander Jackson Davis to design a Gothic revival villa for Belmead. In doing so he radically departed from the tradition of Palladian and classical architecture that had characterized elite Virginia plantations since the mid-eighteenth century. In A. J. Davis’s Belmead: Picturesque Aesthetics in the Land of Slavery, Daniel Bluestone argues that a Davis design resonated differently on the banks of the James River than on the banks of the Hudson. The appeal of Davis’s design lay in its sensitivity to the reciprocity between buildings and landscape, highlighting Cocke’s advocacy of greater stewardship of the land in the place of generations of ruinous agricultural practices. Beyond his villa and his land, Cocke commissioned Davis to design Belmead’s slave quarters. This was an attempt to harmonize himself with his slaves and the nation with an agricultural system based upon chattel slavery rather than yeomen farmers. This essay encourages us to look beyond the universals that often frame architectural history discussions of picturesque aesthetics to situate picturesque designs more precisely within a place-centered context of client vision and socio-cultural meaning.

Early Modern Migration from the Mid-Wales County of Radnorshire to Southeastern Pennsylvania, with Special Reference to Three Meredith Families

In 1971 the Honorable Thomas M. Rees of California observed that "very little has been written of what the Welsh have contributed in all walks of life to the shaping of American history." In 1979 historian David Galenson maintained that "the issue of the composition of America's early immigrants is an impor-tant one and will continue to receive considerable attention from historians who seek to understand the social and economic history of colonial America." However, Douglas Greenburg's examination of the historiography of the middle colonies revealed that Pennsylvania, which witnessed the immigration of many early modern Welsh Quaker migrants, has not attracted as much attention from researchers as has its neighboring states.