Download Free Towards The Improvement Of Agriculture And Rural Life In The Americas Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Towards The Improvement Of Agriculture And Rural Life In The Americas and write the review.

The Routledge History of Rural America charts the course of rural life in the United States, raising questions about what makes a place rural and how rural places have shaped the history of the nation. Bringing together leading scholars to analyze a wide array of themes in rural history and culture, this text is a state-of-the-art resource for students, scholars, and educators at all levels. This Routledge History provides a regional context for understanding change in rural communities across America and examines a number of areas where the history of rural people has deviated from the American mainstream. Readers will come away with an enhanced understanding of the interplay between urban and rural areas, a knowledge of the regional differences within the rural United States, and an awareness of the importance of agriculture and rural life to American society. The book is divided into four main sections: regions of rural America, rural lives in context, change and development, and resources for scholars and teachers. Examining the essays on the regions of rural America, readers can discover what makes New England different from the South, and why the Midwest and Mountain West are quite different places. The chapters on rural lives provide an entrée into the social and cultural history of rural peoples – women, children and men – as well as a description of some of the forces shaping rural communities, such as immigration, race and religious difference. Chapters on change and development examine the forces molding the countryside, such as rural-urban tensions, technological change and increasing globalization. The final section will help scholars and educators integrate rural history into their research, writing, and classrooms. By breaking the field of rural history into so many pieces, this volume adds depth and complexity to the history of the United States, shedding light on an understudied aspect of the American mythology and beliefs about the American dream.
Updated edition: “A balanced economic, social, political, and technological history of rural America . . . A splendid book, rich with detail.” —Agricultural History Review Through most of its history, America has been a rural nation, largely made up of farmers. David B. Danbom’s Born in the Country was the first—and is still the only—general history of rural America. Ranging from pre-Columbian times to the enormous changes of the twentieth century, the book masterfully integrates agricultural, technological, and economic themes with new questions about the American experience. Danbom employs the stories of particular farm families to illustrate the experiences of rural people. This substantially revised and updated third edition: • expands and deepens its coverage of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries • focuses on the changes in agriculture and rural life in the progressive and New Deal eras as well as the massive shifts that have taken place since 1945 • adds new information about African American and Native American agricultural experiences • discusses the decline of agriculture as a productive enterprise and its impact on farm families and communities • explores rural culture, gender issues, agriculture, and the environment • traces the relationship among farmers, agribusiness, and consumers In a new and provocative concluding chapter, Danbom reflects on increasing consumer disenchantment with and resistance to modern agriculture as well as the transformation of rural America into a place where farmers are a shrinking minority. Ultimately, he asks whether a distinctive style of rural life exists any longer in the United States. “A delightful story tracing the social history of U.S. farmers. The book details the attitudes and social life of farm people?how they looked at themselves and how the rest of society saw them.” —Forum
"The Rural Life Problem of the United States" is a treatise on rural life in the United States by an Irish-American researcher and former Member of Parliament, Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett. He looks at rural life there, the economic activities people are likely to engage in there, mostly farming and small businesses. Using his home country of Ireland as a basis for comparison, Plunkett strives to bring out the challenges that the rural dwellers encounter in both countries, made more pronounced by what he sees as a lower allocation of resources compared to the cities.
"Chapters in Rural Progress" by Kenyon L. Butterfield Butterfield was an American agricultural scientist and college administrator known for developing the Cooperative Extension Service at the Land Grant Universities. This book served as a timeline and history of how rural areas of the United States developed and slowly became more and more inhabitable as time went on. Though still behind cities, these areas became more welcoming and vital to the American way of life.
R. Douglas Hurt's brief history of American agriculture, from the prehistoric period through the twentieth century, is written for anyone coming to this subject for the first time. American Agriculture is a story of considerable achievement and success, but it is also a story of greed, racism, and violence. Hurt offers a provocative look at a history that has been shaped by the best and worst of human nature. Here is the background essential for understanding the complexity of American agricultural history, from the transition to commercial agriculture during the colonial period to the failure of government policy following World War II. Complete with maps, drawings, and over seventy splendid photographs, this revised edition closes with an examination of the troubled landscape at the turn of the twenty-first century. It also provides a ready reference to the economic, social, political, scientific, and technological changes that have most affected farming in America and the contributions of African Americans, Native Americans, and women. This survey will serve as a text for courses in the history of American agriculture and rural studies as well as a supplementary text for economic history and rural sociology courses.
In the last decade, rural development emerged as one of the prominent challenges facing the United States. Strong support for rural development is now found in both major political parties and at federal, state, and local levels. There is little doubt that the development of rural America will become even more important in the future. Despite unprecedented growth, both urban and rural areas in the United States are greatly deficient in many aspects of quality living conditions. The nation’s cities are slowly strangling themselves, jamming together people and industry while spawning pollution, transportation paralysis, housing blight, lack of privacy, and a crime-infested society. Rural areas simultaneously suffer from the other extreme: lack of sufficient employment opportunities, outmigration and depopulation, and too few people to support services and institutions. The migration from rural areas contributes to the problems of both the city and countryside depopulating rural places at the expense of overcrowded cities. This book focuses on rural development processes, problems, and solutions. Seven prominent specialists in the field, including agricultural and regional economists, demographers, and administrators, discuss the development of the open country, small towns, and smaller cities (up t fifty thousand population). They present an integrated approach to rural development problems, not a mere collection of readings. Valuable guidelines for policies to benefit both rural and urban areas are provided. Since rural development involves interdisciplinary scholarship, this book will be of interest to a wide range of social scientists working in rural areas both here and abroad. Economists, sociologists, and political scientists, as well as community leaders and planners, legislators, government officials and interested laymen, will find this volume useful in understanding the rural development effort. Chapters on the following topics are included: the Philosophy and Process of Community Development; The Emergence of Area Development; Demographic Trends of the U.S. Rural Population; The Conditions and Problems of Nonmetropolitan America; Systems Planning for rural Development; Use of Natural Resources in Community Development; and Rural Poverty and Urban Growth, An Economic Critique of Alternative Spatial Growth Patterns
When agricultural production and related businesses dominated rural economies, policies that strengthened and improved agriculture tended to strengthen and improve the well-being of most America's small communities and rural residents. As the strength of this linkage declined over the past century, many have felt that the rural policy has been left largely fragmented and unfocused, compromising a patchwork of programs and initiatives rather than a coherent policy. Yet agriculture remains the primary policy framework for Congresses' consideration of rural issues. Significant changes are occurring in the structure of the US agro-food system. These changes are likely to pose important questions about the direction and coherence of current rural policy. Several significant trends in the evolving structure of agriculture are discussed in this book: (1) a continuation in the trend toward fewer and larger farms; (2) a potential acceleration of that trend as production shifts to more tightly integrated and vertically co-ordinated production through supply chains; (3) greater environmental pressures on conventional agricultural production practices stemming from urban and suburban interests; and (4) changing food consumption patterns.