The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America

This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history.

The essays cover a broad range of topics: the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum co...