Volume 34, Number 7 · April 23, 1987
Down on the Farm
By George M. Fredrickson
The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America
edited by Steven Hahn, edited by Jonathan Prude
University of North Carolina Press, 355 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie
by John Mack Faragher
Yale University Press, 280 pp., $25.00
American social historians are, figuratively speaking, moving to the country. After a period when they heavily concentrated on cities and industrial workers, they are now turning some of their attention to the rural settings in which most Americans lived before the twentieth century. To the 'new rural history' they are bringing many of the theories and methods associated with the 'new social history' in general. Among these are demography and the quantification that goes with it, and a comparative international approach that undercuts extreme notions of 'American exceptionalism.' One also finds a neo-Marxian preoccupation with the formation of social classes and the struggle of 'precapitalist' ways of thinking and living in a world increasingly dominated by a commercial and industrial bourgeoisie.
Review, 3528 words
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