| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Cooperative Commonwealth: Co-ops in Rural Minnesota, 1859–1939. By Steven J. Keillor. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000. xvi, 457 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-87351-377-0.)

According to Steven J. Keillor, the historians of rural American have usually viewed cooperative activities as adjuncts of other institutions. This book, he promises, will focus directly upon the ways in which cooperatives "influenced the politics, economics, social life, and ethnicity of rural Minnesota." Keillor devotes a chapter to the beginnings of rural cooperation in Minnesota when Scandinavian and old-stock settlers tried to establish "union stores"; he then allocates at least one chapter each to the activities of the Grangers, fire insurance mutuals, cooperative creameries, the Farmers' Alliance, cooperative stores at the turn of the century, farmers' elevators, telephone companies, Farm Bureau and agricultural college activity, and developments during the 1920s and 1930s. 1

This book grew from the efforts of the Minnesota Historical Society to inventory the coop records in Minnesota archives and relate them to rural press files. Keillor draws also upon the historical literature dealing with American farm organizations and midwestern social and economic life. Interspersed case studies and illustrative details deepen and color the narrative. . . .

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