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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 102.2 | The History Cooperative
102.2  
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June, 2006
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Reviews

At Home in the Hoosier Hills
Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810–1870

By Richard F. Nation
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 274. Maps, notes, index. $35.00.)

Richard F. Nation argues that an intense sense of localism distinguishes early residents of the hill country of southern Indiana from their neighbors elsewhere in the state. For Nation, this localism forms an overriding and unifying theme of the region's religious, economic, and political life. It explains the reluctance of southern Indiana residents to embrace some of the changes that other Hoosiers considered marks of progress, a reluctance that in turn led some to label hill country Hoosiers as backward and lazy. 1
      In religious life, residents of southern Indiana formed neighborhood congregations to which they gave the power to regulate the moral life of their communities. Nation discusses German Catholics and Primitive Baptists in particular; both, as he shows, remained suspicious of beliefs in human perfectionism, preferring to think of humankind as innately sinful. Followers of each sect distrusted reform movements, such as temperance or abolitionism, that aimed to perfect society and presumed the right of outsiders to pronounce judgment on the morals of distant others. . . .
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