rural
Living History
07/17/2010 22:48
Launched a new page, about our experiences with Living History. Lots of slideshows and videos, which I'm posting as I complete them. The first set will be from our family Fourth of July experience -- an immersion into 1802 pioneering on the upstate New York frontier. Among them, one of me learning a little blacksmithing.
Going to New Harmony!
05/21/2010 07:35
Knowlton was a friend of Robert Dale Owen, and probably knew Frances Wright (Nashoba). As a freethinker and a doctor, he had a strange status in Franklin County society. He and his Free Enquirer Society friends (men and women, because the Society considered women full members with all the rights of their male counterparts) were clearly interested in utopian ideas well outside the mainstream of their Western Massachusetts communities. But what did they do about it? Did the fact that they stayed home give them any influence on their home communities? Politics? Culture? I’m looking forward to talking about this, and to hearing what other people have been thinking about intentional communities this fall.
Pioneer House
05/15/2010 19:44
Local Money
05/05/2010 07:37
The rural merchants that I’m studying spent a lot of their time getting credit notes on inventories, drafts on consignments to urban merchants, etc. And then converting these instruments to forms of currency they could use to pay local farmers, that the farmers could in turn use to buy stuff from them, other merchants, and each other. They worked with a dozen banks throughout their region, as well as many of the local rich men who had money laying around or were willing to endorse their notes. Later in their careers, a couple of them even started their own banks.
I think these guys really created a cash economy in their region. But, contrary to some of the histories I’ve been reading about the “transition to capitalism,” I don’t see them as outsiders, imposing some alien, urban (and corrupt, or corrupting, many of the histories imply) economic system on these poor, unwary rural folk. In the first place, these merchants are rural folk. And not only that; they’re popular. People like them. Sure, they get into occasional beefs with their neighbors -- but that doesn’t seem to be that rare, and it doesn’t seem to alienate them from their society. I’m going to keep digging at this, and see what more I find to back up my observations so far.
According to another little article in the same Adbuster issue, 68% of money spent in locally owned retailers stays local (mostly in the form of payrolls and taxes), versus 43% of the money spent at box stores or big chains. The effect is obviously enhanced if you can also buy stuff that is produced locally (and not surprisingly, local producers, artisans and service people are big supporters of Berkshares), but even if you buy a mass produced product at a local shop, you can do it with Berkshares. They look nice, too. And I’ve gotta believe they feel like money, since for generations Dalton Massachusetts has been the source of the paper used in US$ greenbacks.
No England trip this year
04/10/2010 17:18
They ran out of space, and had to uninvite one or more of the people whose papers they’d previously accepted. Really.
So I won’t have a chance to go to the Bishopsgate Institute and look at the Bradlaugh files this fall. Well, maybe the following fall, after I’ve sold that project. I can write a proposal without the Bishopsgate material, after all.
As far as Rural History 2010 goes, it looks like there won’t be much North American representation there. I was hoping to get a better idea about how Europeans and members of the British Commonwealth do rural history. But based on the conference schedule, it looks like they do a lot of stuff that isn’t really that good a fit with what I’m interested in doing. So I can see why they thought my paper might be one they could afford to lose.
Life goes on. The change of plans will give me a chance to get to the Pacific Northwest and finish my research for this Dissertation/book project. Probably a better idea at this point, anyway.
The good news is that the family will be represented in England anyway this fall. Steph's hat has been selected to be in a fashion show and on display at the British hat museum! Story here.
It's already Spring in Connecticut
04/02/2010 11:08
I went to UConn yesterday and met Christopher Clark. He let me tell him about my project for over ninety minutes, and even bought me a cup of coffee. I am extremely grateful and his comments and questions were a huge help.
I see my project and the rural history I want to do as being at least partly in the "lineage" of the type of work people like Professor Clark have done. In the introduction to Social Change in America: From the Revolution through the Civil War, Clark says “Since the emergence of the ‘new social history’ in the 1960s there has been a massive outpouring of scholarship on...the complexities of class, race, and gender...Because these subjects involve studying human interactions in specific contexts, much social history has been conducted at the local level, using particular places, instances, or regions to illustrate broader historical tendencies.” (ix)
Notwithstanding this description and several detailed, nuanced and qualified books I’ve read this semester, many works including some of the new social history place studies seem to follow preexisting theoretical models. It’s always hard to determine whether the scholarship behind them was organized around a preexisting system, or whether the findings led there and the book was just written to seem like it was inevitable. But it’s at least possible to observe that many of these place studies lack human subjects. I think this is due both to the complexity of the demographic and economic material being presented, and maybe also to the historian’s underlying hope to show the outlines of a structure comparable to the grand explanatory schemes of earlier historical subdisciplines. Professor Clark, who had been discussing Nature’s Metropolis in a seminar just before we met, said that one student’s reaction to the book was initial dismay when Cronon announced in the introduction that there were no people in the book, but ultimately appreciation for the way Cronon managed to tell several fast-paced, conflict-laden stories, even though he didn’t use the particulars of individual characters’ lives (Note to self: It’s probably worth looking closely again at NM as an example of how to do narrative on generic or inanimate subjects). But not all authors manage this as successfully, and the end result is often a set stage waiting for actors.
Professor Clark makes two points at the beginning of Social Change I thought were relevant to my project. First, he says, “regional social differences are at the heart of...national developments. These differences were not variations or exceptions to general trends; rather, their interactions were the essence of social change.” Second, “the inequalities of status between individuals within households played almost as significant a role in driving social change as conflicts...between social groups.” (xi)
These are both really interesting statements, from my “rural history” point of view. The first one blows away the top-down structure of historical theory I complained about a couple of paragraphs ago. This is a break from the older historical approach of fitting local data into “big” models like central place theory -- and feeling obligated to leave the stories of individuals out because they introduce too many messy, local, contingent irregularities. It elevates the local, particular, contingent stories of actual people. It's not even "history from the bottom up" -- up being where the big theory and credibility presumably lie. He's saying "this is where history really happens."
The second statement seems to imply that the family is a both a microcosm and a model for society in the 18th and 19th centuries. That people experienced conflicts of interest, power relationships, and resistance inside families that colored their understanding of the social landscape. Is he saying class consciousness is based on family and household relationships? Where does he find this? (I put the library copy aside and ordered the book, so when it arrives I’ll find out) Regional particularities could be expected to play a huge role in these different visions of society. Not only in terms of dependence/unfreedom vs. independence/freedom, but in more subtle shadings of agency, responsibility, scope of social action, etc.
I wonder if doing a national-scope book like Social Change makes it harder to address these narrower questions? It requires you to spend a lot of (most of? all of?) your time talking about the north-south issue. Slavery is so huge, and the issues so stark, that it might not be possible to get at the more subtle issues that influenced other elements of the different social visions that differentiated the middle west from New England or the arid west from the Ohio Valley. Does examining slavery hide some of these other regional issues? Did it at the time?
I went ahead and ordered a copy of Social Change, so I can read it more closely (that is, write in it) and include it on my field list. I’ll going to come back to this, once I’ve done that.
I see my project and the rural history I want to do as being at least partly in the "lineage" of the type of work people like Professor Clark have done. In the introduction to Social Change in America: From the Revolution through the Civil War, Clark says “Since the emergence of the ‘new social history’ in the 1960s there has been a massive outpouring of scholarship on...the complexities of class, race, and gender...Because these subjects involve studying human interactions in specific contexts, much social history has been conducted at the local level, using particular places, instances, or regions to illustrate broader historical tendencies.” (ix)
Notwithstanding this description and several detailed, nuanced and qualified books I’ve read this semester, many works including some of the new social history place studies seem to follow preexisting theoretical models. It’s always hard to determine whether the scholarship behind them was organized around a preexisting system, or whether the findings led there and the book was just written to seem like it was inevitable. But it’s at least possible to observe that many of these place studies lack human subjects. I think this is due both to the complexity of the demographic and economic material being presented, and maybe also to the historian’s underlying hope to show the outlines of a structure comparable to the grand explanatory schemes of earlier historical subdisciplines. Professor Clark, who had been discussing Nature’s Metropolis in a seminar just before we met, said that one student’s reaction to the book was initial dismay when Cronon announced in the introduction that there were no people in the book, but ultimately appreciation for the way Cronon managed to tell several fast-paced, conflict-laden stories, even though he didn’t use the particulars of individual characters’ lives (Note to self: It’s probably worth looking closely again at NM as an example of how to do narrative on generic or inanimate subjects). But not all authors manage this as successfully, and the end result is often a set stage waiting for actors.
Professor Clark makes two points at the beginning of Social Change I thought were relevant to my project. First, he says, “regional social differences are at the heart of...national developments. These differences were not variations or exceptions to general trends; rather, their interactions were the essence of social change.” Second, “the inequalities of status between individuals within households played almost as significant a role in driving social change as conflicts...between social groups.” (xi)
These are both really interesting statements, from my “rural history” point of view. The first one blows away the top-down structure of historical theory I complained about a couple of paragraphs ago. This is a break from the older historical approach of fitting local data into “big” models like central place theory -- and feeling obligated to leave the stories of individuals out because they introduce too many messy, local, contingent irregularities. It elevates the local, particular, contingent stories of actual people. It's not even "history from the bottom up" -- up being where the big theory and credibility presumably lie. He's saying "this is where history really happens."
The second statement seems to imply that the family is a both a microcosm and a model for society in the 18th and 19th centuries. That people experienced conflicts of interest, power relationships, and resistance inside families that colored their understanding of the social landscape. Is he saying class consciousness is based on family and household relationships? Where does he find this? (I put the library copy aside and ordered the book, so when it arrives I’ll find out) Regional particularities could be expected to play a huge role in these different visions of society. Not only in terms of dependence/unfreedom vs. independence/freedom, but in more subtle shadings of agency, responsibility, scope of social action, etc.
I wonder if doing a national-scope book like Social Change makes it harder to address these narrower questions? It requires you to spend a lot of (most of? all of?) your time talking about the north-south issue. Slavery is so huge, and the issues so stark, that it might not be possible to get at the more subtle issues that influenced other elements of the different social visions that differentiated the middle west from New England or the arid west from the Ohio Valley. Does examining slavery hide some of these other regional issues? Did it at the time?
I went ahead and ordered a copy of Social Change, so I can read it more closely (that is, write in it) and include it on my field list. I’ll going to come back to this, once I’ve done that.
Maps!
12/04/2009 23:04
Maps, maps, maps. I love ‘em! Always have, since I was a kid -- A.E. Van Vogt notwithstanding (couldn't help the geeky reference to “Null-A” novels that stress the general semantics notion that “the map is not the territory”).
The various measuring authorities in the government (USDA’s ERS, the Census Bureau, the Statistical Abstract, etc.) have been working the last few years to redefine urban and rural. More on that later, but for the time being, the point is that they’ve introduced these things called “core-based” units. All the good measurements are done on a county-by-county basis, so the units are counties where there’s a “metropolitan” core population of at least 50,000. Or a “micropolitan” core of 10,000. From that, they create “combined statistical areas” that consist of a “core” and its feeder areas, tied to it by easy commuting routes to work, markets, etc. The result is a map that looks like this:
The purples are the combined statistical areas (CSAs). These are the cities and large towns it’s easy to call urban, and the surrounding counties that may look rural, but are economically tied to these centers. There are also cities and towns outside the CSAs. In Minnesota, for example, Duluth and Mankato (pop.s around 85,000 and 45,000, respectively) are not parts of CSAs. So it’s going to take some thinking to sort this all out.
But in the meantime, there are more colorful maps to look at! The fact that some of them contradict each other only adds to the fun!
This one, produced by the University of Illinois Regional Economics and Public Policy Group (REAP), suggests that over 300 rural counties are “more prosperous” than the national average. That’s interesting, and warrants a close look at the article backing up the map.
This next one, from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, claims “Rural areas across the country generally have seen more growth in employment than have cities.” But the map tells a different story. The “Growth” they’re talking about is actually a slightly smaller DECLINE in rural employment relative to urban employment in some areas. Hardly the happy news advertised in the headline. Especially since there are FEWER JOBS in rural areas, so you’d expect less decline. Or am I missing something?
And here’s one last map for today, to dispel any lingering doubts about how peachy the economy looks in the country. The New York Times built this map showing the increase in people receiving Food Stamps in each U.S. county. 14.6% of rural residents use Food Stamps (vs. 10.8% of urban folks). From 2007 to 2009, the number of people using Food Stamps rose by about 30%, although in many places, only half of those who qualify are actually getting Food Stamps. The cool thing about the NYT map is that you can drag your cursor over it, and the statistics for each county will pop up. It’s SCARY. Good job, NYT.
The various measuring authorities in the government (USDA’s ERS, the Census Bureau, the Statistical Abstract, etc.) have been working the last few years to redefine urban and rural. More on that later, but for the time being, the point is that they’ve introduced these things called “core-based” units. All the good measurements are done on a county-by-county basis, so the units are counties where there’s a “metropolitan” core population of at least 50,000. Or a “micropolitan” core of 10,000. From that, they create “combined statistical areas” that consist of a “core” and its feeder areas, tied to it by easy commuting routes to work, markets, etc. The result is a map that looks like this:
But in the meantime, there are more colorful maps to look at! The fact that some of them contradict each other only adds to the fun!
Rural People's Thoughts?
12/03/2009 14:48
So I’m looking at the first couple of pages of Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America. Yeah, I know I should really be reading student papers or writing one of my two final papers for this semester. But I was curious. This is one of the books everyone in Environmental History mentions, like Raymond Williams The Country and the City (which I also bought this semester, and haven’t read yet).
In any case, Berry starts strong, claiming “as a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.” Berry compares the conquistadors’ conquest of America with America’s conquest of the moon; both filled with fantasy and avarice he says. But clearly there’s a difference.
An imperial technocratic bureaucracy sent two men to the surface of the moon in 1969. Although I remember the excitement and sheer adventure of this event, and myself sitting in front of a black-and-white TV explaining the technical details to my grandmother, that’s what it was. But not so much, the missions to the New World in the seventeenth century.
It took a lot of people to sail ships and establish colonies in the Americas. Doesn’t seem as easy, to say they all shared the motivations of the leaders. And even the leaders – what were their actual motivations? Even Cortes and Pizarro settled down, and became mayors of the towns they established. Cortes burned his ships; a pretty definite statement for a twenty-something young man to make about the old world and home.
In the north, where people came to start commercial agricultural colonies (Virginia) or religious communities (Massachusetts, Maryland), I have to wonder about the goals of the majority. Even for the Puritans, were they perhaps motivated just a little by the fact that there were limited opportunities back home? Even if we believe they were completely open about their own motives, are we to take the professed goals of colonist leaders as the reason everybody came to America?
If not, how do we get at the motivations and thoughts of the majority? The folks who in large numbers became the same rural people whose wishes and needs go largely ignored in the agri-business dominated countryside Berry is going to talk about throughout the book? Yesterday I was reading the beginning chapters of David Danbom’s Resisted Revolution. He was talking about the same thing: an “urban agrarian” agenda that motivated the Progressives’ Country Life Movement. So, it looks like this question of “what do rural people really think?” is going to be a recurring one.
Also this week, we talked about Rachel Carson in Environmental History. And again, on the drive home, I found myself wondering, how did actual farmers and country people react to this? Was it just a suburban-ecologists vs. urban-agrocorporate chemists type of thing?
(cross-posted on my rural history blog)
In any case, Berry starts strong, claiming “as a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.” Berry compares the conquistadors’ conquest of America with America’s conquest of the moon; both filled with fantasy and avarice he says. But clearly there’s a difference.
An imperial technocratic bureaucracy sent two men to the surface of the moon in 1969. Although I remember the excitement and sheer adventure of this event, and myself sitting in front of a black-and-white TV explaining the technical details to my grandmother, that’s what it was. But not so much, the missions to the New World in the seventeenth century.
It took a lot of people to sail ships and establish colonies in the Americas. Doesn’t seem as easy, to say they all shared the motivations of the leaders. And even the leaders – what were their actual motivations? Even Cortes and Pizarro settled down, and became mayors of the towns they established. Cortes burned his ships; a pretty definite statement for a twenty-something young man to make about the old world and home.
In the north, where people came to start commercial agricultural colonies (Virginia) or religious communities (Massachusetts, Maryland), I have to wonder about the goals of the majority. Even for the Puritans, were they perhaps motivated just a little by the fact that there were limited opportunities back home? Even if we believe they were completely open about their own motives, are we to take the professed goals of colonist leaders as the reason everybody came to America?
If not, how do we get at the motivations and thoughts of the majority? The folks who in large numbers became the same rural people whose wishes and needs go largely ignored in the agri-business dominated countryside Berry is going to talk about throughout the book? Yesterday I was reading the beginning chapters of David Danbom’s Resisted Revolution. He was talking about the same thing: an “urban agrarian” agenda that motivated the Progressives’ Country Life Movement. So, it looks like this question of “what do rural people really think?” is going to be a recurring one.
Also this week, we talked about Rachel Carson in Environmental History. And again, on the drive home, I found myself wondering, how did actual farmers and country people react to this? Was it just a suburban-ecologists vs. urban-agrocorporate chemists type of thing?
(cross-posted on my rural history blog)
