| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest. By Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. vii plus 300 pp.).

Few historians still ask Frederick Jackson Turner's question: How did the encounter with the physical environment shape Americans' outlook, values, and behavior? Historians of rural children and families, following in the footsteps of such novelists as Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder, do, however, continue to explore the impact of the rural environment on children's everyday experience and attitudes. Katherine Harris and Elliott West have argued that the experience was essentially positive. Rural life undermined hierarchies of age and gender, fostered family interdependence, and produced children who were more self-reliant, mobile, adaptable, responsible, and fiercely independent than their urban or eastern counterparts, not to mention more in touch with nature. In contrast, Elizabeth Hampsten and Lillian Schlissel paint a grim portrait of loneliness, privation, abuse, and demanding physical labor from an early age.

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