| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Richard F. Nation. At Home in the Hoosier Hills: Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810–1870. (Midwestern History and Culture.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 274. $35.00.
There are many worlds we have lost in the American past, localities whose cultural norms have differed from the mainstream. And those that did not hew to dominant American trends are often forgotten by historians because they were not part of the master narrative of United States history. So argues Richard F. Nation in this thoughtful study of the Hill Country, twenty-some counties in southern Indiana, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Although most scholarship of the nineteenth-century Middle West has centered on the ascendancy of capitalism and nationalism embodied in the rise of the Republican Party, Nation tells the story of a subregion centered on a deep and abiding sense of localism.	1
Nation argues that residents of southern Indiana fostered a belief that polity and society were most decent when centered on the local community. This belief in localism, which shaped economic development and political ideology, was informed to a great degree by religious belief. The Euro-American migrants to the region in the early nineteenth century were of diverse origins, arriving from states in the Mid-Atlantic and Upland South as well as from Roman Catholic Germany. These people came to own land and many of their families were successful in acquiring property. Few places at the time, Nation informs his readers, equaled the access to land available in southern Indiana. Because of this, Hoosiers maintained an egalitarian worldview while they simultaneously organized their agricultural world around a hierarchical family. Like many rural dwellers in nineteenth- century America, these Hoosiers paradoxically celebrated equality amid their authoritarian families.	. . .

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