The Great Depression emboldened Americans to tolerate radical experimentation in search of solutions to seemingly overwhelming economic problems. Amongst the thorniest of those was rural southern poverty. In Trouble in Goshen, Fred C. Smith focuses on three communities designed and implemented to meet that challenge. This book examines the economic and social theories―and their histories―that resulted in the creation and operation of the most aggressive and radical experiments in the United States. Trouble in Goshen chronicles three communitarian experiments, both the administrative details and the struggles and reactions of the clients. Smith covers the Tupelo Homesteads in Mississippi, the Dyess Colony in Arkansas, and the Delta Cooperative Farm, also in Mississippi. The Tupelo Homesteads were created under the aegis of the tiny Division of Subsistence Homesteads, a short-lived, “first New Deal” agency. Dyess Colony was the largest of the Resettlement Administration’s efforts to transform failed farmers into Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. The third community, the Delta Cooperative Farm, a product of the active cooperation between the Socialist Party of America and a cadre of liberal churchmen led by Reinhold Niebuhr, attempted to meld the pieties, passions, propaganda, and theories of Jesus and Marx. The equipment, facilities, and management styles of the projects reveal a clearly delineated class order among the poor. Trouble in Goshen demonstrates the class conscious angst that enveloped three distinct levels of poverty and the struggles of plain folk to preserve their tenuous status and avoid overt peasantry.

Product Description: With a population of about two thousand, Pembroke Township, one of the largest rural, black communities north of the Mason-Dixon Line, sits in an isolated corner of Kankakee County, Illinois, sixty-five miles south of Chicago. It is also one of the poorest places in the nation...read more

Product Description: “This book tells what it means to be a woman when you are poor, when you are proud, and when you are a hillbilly.”First published in 1973, Skye Moody’s Hillbilly Women shares the stunning and raw oral histories of 19 women in 20th-century Southern Appalachia, from their day-to-day struggles for survival to the personal triumphs of their hardscrabble existence...read more

Product Description: The overall theme of this book concerns the multiplicity and complexities of discursive constructions of water in Western economies in relation to irrigation communities. The authors argue that the politics of place is given meaning in relation to local knowledges and within multiple and multiscalar institutional frameworks involved with the social, physical, economic and political practices associated with water...read more

Statutory authorities frequently face anxieties in the management of families where previous fatal child abuse has occurred. The principles and practices set down here should provide both managers and practitioners with a way forward.

Product Description: One of the largest volunteer movements in the twentieth century, local farm and home bureau organizations have been woefully underrepresented in socio-political studies of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Nancy K. Berlage addresses this omission with an insightful look at how bureau members put university science to work in agricultural and rural life at the local level, even while industrialization, and urbanization profoundly shifted the landscape of labor in the U...read more

Product Description: The Gwich'in Natives of Arctic Village, Alaska, have experienced intense social and economic changes for more than a century. In the late 20th century, new transportation and communication technologies introduced radically new value systems; while some of these changes may be seen as socially beneficial, others suggest a weakening of what was once a strong and vibrant Native community...read more

Product Description: A compendium of interesting or arcane details and statistics, as well as history, customs and lore, this is an unabashed celebration of the English village, as well as a record of an often vanished world.

Product Description: From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans...read more

Product Description: [*Read by the author - J.D. Vance]J. D. Vance's grandparents moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility...read more

Product Description: Dana Loesch believes in Christianity, patriotism, traditional marriage, and the right to bear arms, among other “quaint”  ideas. For the elites in DC, Los Angeles, New York, and Silicon Valley, that makes her as bizarre as a three-headed dog...read more

Product Description: In Ranching, Mining, and the Human Impact of Natural Resource Development, Raymond L. Gold observes and reports on people whose lives have been significantly affected by the industrialization of rural communities in the American West...read more