| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas Summerhill. Harvest of Dissent: Agrarianism in Nineteenth-Century New York. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 287. $38.00.
With the publication of this book, Thomas Summerhill adds to a growing body of scholarship that challenges the historiography of a static rural society by focusing on agrarian dissent from the perspective of New York farmers to argue that agrarian protest was neither episodic nor nostalgic. Indeed, farmers engaged in a century-long effort to maneuver within the existing political, economic, and social realms to protect their interests and advance their demands for a political economy that supported the agrarian foundations of the republic. By the end of the century, however, agrarians had gravitated toward organizations that eschewed political action as ineffective in defending their economic interests. Summerhill limits his geographical arena to three counties in Central New York but analyzes agrarianism over the span of the nineteenth century.	1
Until hops and dairy farming began to characterize production at midcentury, farmers in Delaware, Otsego, and Schoharie counties cultivated a variety of subsistence crops, harvested timber, and raised hogs and cattle on land they worked as landowners and tenants. Regardless of their status, farmers shared a commitment to an ideology of republicanism that valued individual liberty and political democracy, ideals that Summerhill recognizes as inherently radical. As the market intruded into customary economic and social relations, farmers fought to sustain traditional republican values as a bulwark against the "worst feature[s] of the capitalist system" and secure the family farm as "the economic and social foundation of rural life" (p. 219).	. . .

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