Rural history


In historiography, rural history is a field of study focusing on the history of societies in rural areas. At its inception, the field was based on the economic history of agriculture. Since the 1980s it has become increasingly influenced by social history and has diverged from the economic and technological focuses of "agricultural history". It is a counterpart to urban history.
A number of academic journals and learned societies exist to promote rural history.

History

Rural history emerged as a distinct discipline from agricultural history in the 1980s and was inspired by the French Annales school which favoured integrating economic, social and political history. Initially focused predominantly on the social history of rural life and later became increasingly interested in cultural history.
In Europe, the study of rural history is supported by the European Rural History Organisation.

National studies

Britain

Burchardt evaluates the state of English rural history and focuses on an "orthodox" school dealing chiefly with the economic history of agriculture. The orthodox historians made "impressive progress" in quantifying and explaining the growth of output and productivity since the agricultural revolution. A challenge came from a dissident tradition that looked chiefly at the negative social costs of agricultural progress, especially enclosure. In the late 20th century there arose a new school, associated with the journal Rural History. Led by Alun Howkins, it links rural Britain to a wider social history. Burchardt calls for a new countryside history, paying more attention to the cultural and representational aspects that shaped 20th-century rural life.

United States

In the U.S. most rural history has focused on the South—overwhelmingly rural until the 1950s—but there is a "new rural history" of the North as well. Instead of becoming agrarian capitalists, farmers held onto preindustrial capitalist values emphasizing family and community. Rural areas maintained population stability; kinship ties determined rural immigrant settlement and community structures; and the defeminization of farm work encouraged the rural version of the "women's sphere." These findings strongly contrast with those in the old frontier history as well as those found in the new urban history.
Modernization came in the 20th century, with the arrival of mechanization, the model T, better roads, and the agricultural agent—as well as electricity, and radio.

France

Rural history has been a major specialty of French scholars since the 1920s, thanks especially to the central role of the Annales School. Its journal Annales focuses attention on the synthesizing of historical patterns identified from social, economic, and cultural history, statistics, medical reports, family studies, and even psychoanalysis.

Specialised journals

A number of academic journals exist with a specific focus on rural history. These include:

British

  • Butlin, R. A. The Transformation of Rural England, c. 1580-1800: A Study in Historical Geography
  • Hanawalt, Barbara A. The Ties That Bound. Peasant Families in Medieval England
  • Hilton, R. H. The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages.
  • Howkins, Alun. Reshaping Rural England 1850-1925
  • Howkins, Alun. The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside since 1900
  • Keith, William. The Rural Tradition: A Study of the Non-Fiction Prose Writers of the English Countryside
  • Kussmaul, Anne. Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England
  • Mingay, G. E., ed. The Victorian Countryside
  • Spufford, Margaret. Figures in the landscape : rural society in England, 1500-1700
  • Taylor, Christopher. Village and Farmstead. A History of Rural Settlement in England.
  • Thirsk, Joan, editor. The Agrarian History of England and Wales, a monumental scholarly history, from prehistory to 1939.
  • Verdon, Nicola. "‘The modern countrywoman’: farm women, domesticity and social change in interwar Britain." History Workshop Journal 70#1.

United States

Cyclopedia of American agriculture; a popular survey of agricultural conditions, ed by L. H. Bailey, 4 vol 1907-1909. highly useful compendium
  • Baron, Hal S. Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930
  • Bowers, William L. The Country Life Movement in America, 1900-1920.
  • Brunner, Edmund de Schweinitz. Rural social trends
  • Danbom, David B. Born in the Country: A History of Rural America
  • Gjerde, Jon. The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917
  • Goreham, Gary A. Encyclopedia of Rural America ; 438pp; 232 essays by experts on arts, business, community development, economics, education, environmental issues, family, labor, quality of life, recreation, and sports.
  • Hurt, Douglas, ed. The Rural South Since World War II
  • Kirby, Jack Temple. Rural Worlds Lost: The American South 1920-1960
  • Kulikoff; Allan. From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers
  • Lauck, Jon. "'The Silent Artillery of Time': Understanding Social Change in the Rural Midwest," Great Plains Quarterly 19
  • Schafer, Joseph. The social history of American agriculture
  • Weeden, William Babcock. Economic and Social History of New England, 1620-1789 964 pages;
  • Wyman, Andrea. Rural women teachers in the United States

Netherlands and Belgium

Curtis, D., , review essay in BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review'' 128.3 60-95.

Historiography

  • Alfonso, Isabel, ed. The Rural History of Medieval European Societies. Trends and Perspectives, Turnhout: Brepols, 2007.
  • Atack, Jeremy. "A Nineteenth-century Resource for Agricultural History Research in the Twenty-first Century." Agricultural History 2004 78: 389-412. Fulltext: in University of California Journals and Ebsco. On a large computerized database of individual American farmers from manuscript census.
  • Barron, Hal S. "Rediscovering the Majority: The New Rural History of the Nineteenth-Century North," Historical Methods, Fall 1986, Vol. 19 Issue 4, pp 141–152
  • Blanke, David. “Consumer Choice, Agency, and New Directions in Rural History,” Agricultural History 81#2, 182-203.
  • Bogue, Allan G. "Tilling Agricultural History with Paul Wallace Gates and James C. Malin." Agricultural History 2006 80: 436-460. Fulltext: in Ebsco
  • Burton, Vernon O. "Reaping What We Sow: Community and Rural History," Agricultural History, Fall 2002, Vol. 76 Issue 4, pp 630–58
  • Dyer, C. "The Past, the Present and the Future in Medieval Rural History". Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture 1:1, pp. 37–49.
  • Swierenga, Robert P. "Theoretical Perspectives on the New Rural History: From Environmentalism to Modernization,” Agricultural History 56#3 : 495-502, focus on United States.

Primary sources

  • Phillips, Ulrich B. ed. Plantation and Frontier Documents, 1649–1863; Illustrative of Industrial History in the Colonial and Antebellum South: Collected from MSS. and Other Rare Sources. 2 Volumes.. and
  • Rasmussen, Wayne, ed. Agriculture in the United States: A Documentary History 2800 pages of primary sources.
  • Schmidt, Louis Bernard, ed. Readings in the economic history of American agriculture
  • Sorokin, Pitirim, et al., eds. A Systematic Sourcebook in Rural Sociology, 2000 pages of primary sources and commentary; worldwide coverage; ; also see ; also see