Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Countrysides Transformed, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Rural and agricultural history provide their readers different perspectives on the ways in which the countryside has changed over the course of American history. Rural history approaches the question of change from the perspective of communities and families, while agricultural history generally eschews the social perspective for issues of crop production. Such is the case of two recent and important books in rural and agricultural history, Hal Barron's Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformationin the Rural North, 1870-1930 and Steven Stoll's The Fruits of Natural Advantage: The Making of the Industrial Countryside in California. While both authors are intimately concerned …