| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Susan Sessions Rugh. Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest. (Midwestern History and Culture.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2001. Pp. xxi, 285. $45.00.

In The Cultural Approach to History, a compilation of papers presented at the meeting of the American Historical Association in 1939, James C. Malin described his studies of Kansas farm populations, in which he used manuscript census data, as history "written from the bottom up" (p. 300). Susan Sessions Rugh's book illustrates such history today. Malin would find unfamiliar language here: the agrarian myth, rural capitalism and ideology, producerism, communal values, ideologies of gender and patriarchy, family strategies, patrimonial commitment, bourgeois society, risk avoidance, and ironies. The book is, Rugh explains, "about the making of the family farm culture out of diverse groups," its relationship "to the expanding market, and the ways that the changing values of the broader national culture threatened rural society." "Family farm culture" she explains, helped "resolve the contradictions between the family and the market, community and individualism, tradition and transformation" (pp. xv-xvi). Defining rural history as "the study of social changes associated with the expansion of market agriculture," the author maintains that it "offers a framework for analyzing the formation of the family farm culture." The holders of differing communal and cultural values interacted, confronting changing market imperatives. Knowledge of these processes, Rugh suggests, enhances understanding of changes at regional, national, community, and family levels and also of the "many paradoxes of the agrarian myth" (pp. xvii, xix). . . .

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