Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth Century Midwest

2001, by Dr. Susan Sessions Rugh

**Highly recommended reading for those who wish to understand county culture and history.

From the jacket inside cover: Agrarian ideology flourished in the nineteenth century Midwest, where countless settler families carved homesteads out of the prairie and nurtured ideas 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.

Shelf G-1