| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America. Edited by Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. xii + 335 pp. Notes, index. $45.00, cloth; $24.95, paper.)

Created as a successor to Steven Hahn's and Jonathan Prude's 1985 volume, The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State takes up where that volume left off, following the history of rural America into the twentieth century. The thirteen essays in this volume are loosely organized around the theme of the relationship of the modern, centralized state to the residents of the countryside. Divided into three sections, the essays first turn to the question of "What are the democratic possibilities of our agrarian legacy?" followed by case studies of how the state has been used by "the dispossessed" for their own purposes, and then several essays examining federal policy (pp.8, 9). Finally, the volume turns to the politics of the contemporary countryside. The essays represent a broad geographic sweep, including, among others, essays on California, Colorado, North Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia. As such, it should be useful to scholars with a wide variety of regional interests. . . .

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