Our common country
Subtitle: family farming, culture, and community in the nineteenth-century Midwest
By: Susan Sessions Rugh.
Series: Midwestern history and culture
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Bloomington
Language: eng
Number of pages: 285
Subjects: Farm life -- Middle West -- History -- 19th century.; Community life -- Middle West -- History -- 19th century.; Middle West -- Rural conditions.; Fountain Green (Ill. : Township) -- Social conditions -- 19th century.; Fountain Green (Ill. : Township) -- Economic conditions -- 19th century.
Description: "Agrarian ideology flourished in the nineteenth-century Midwest, where countless settler families carved homesteads out of the prairie and nurtured ideals that we consider distinctively American - independence, democracy, community, piety. Our Common Country explains the making of the family farm culture in the heartland by telling the story of families in rural Fountain Green, Illinois, from settlement to century's end.

A richly textured social history narrative of people the reader will come to know, the book examines three themes: changing cultural identities, the expansion of the market, and the adoption of class-based gender ideologies. It features a major political conflict at each stage of market expansion - the Mormon troubles, the Civil War, and the Grange protest - to highlight the transformations that took place."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [257]-274) and index.