Book Review

Canada and the United States

In this book, Ronald R. Kline argues that technologies such as the telephone, the automobile, household electrification, and the radio represented urban amenities and modern reforms in rural households, but each technology was adapted in specific and sometimes surprising ways, creating "novel forms of modernity on the American farm" (p. 19) by the middle of the twentieth century. Country Life reformers and commercial interests alike promoted—or, as Kline says repeatedly, "pushed"—the spread (and sale) of new technologies to rural people, but Kline's analysis presents rural consumers as active rather than passive in this process (never mere consumers). He presents the process itself as a complex cultural dialogue between urban and rural people, and among rural people, about the possible meanings and manifestations of what "modern" life might look like. Kline argues persuasively that neither "modernity" nor "urbanization" was an inevitable or monolithic process in the American countryside. Moreover, by studying each of the technologies, he allows us to see how rural people negotiated specific ideas of modernity piece by piece, treating the promises of the telephone differently, say, than the demands of wholesale electrification, or the automobiles of sightseers differently than the variously useful engines of their own automobiles. Kline's attention to differences of class, region, and gender further refines his analysis of these interrelated transformations of the technologies of rural life.

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