Countryside in the Age of the Modern State

"However urban the nation has become," Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston write, "twenty percent of its citizens still live outside major metropolitan areas. Moreover, rural economic activity—agricultural, extractive, recreational, and industrial—has an enormous impact on the nation's overall economic well-being. The stories of contemporary rural people still have the power to move us.... They reflect the values, dreams, and ideals at the core of the economically, racially, and ethnically diverse American experience."

The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State moves rural history into explorations of modern politics: diverse rural peoples and their complex relationships to the American state in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors examine African American progressive farm organizers; the experiences of Caribbean and Mexican farm laborers; agrarian intellectuals in the New Deal; the politics of land and landscape in the Rocky Mountain west; and the origins of today's rural political movements.

Catherine McNicol Stock is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Connecticut College. She is the author of Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains and Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain, also from Cornell. Robert D. Johnston is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. He is the coeditor, with Burton J. Bledstein, of The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class.