Cantitate/Preț
Produs
Total produse
Vezi coșul
Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America de Dona Brown

Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America: Studies in American Thought and Culture

Autor Dona Brown
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 19 mai 2011
For many, “going back to the land” brings to mind the 1960s and 1970s—hippie communes and the Summer of Love, The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News. More recently, the movement has reemerged in a new enthusiasm for locally produced food and more sustainable energy paths. But these latest back-to-the-landers are part of a much larger story. Americans have been dreaming of returning to the land ever since they started to leave it. In Back to the Land, Dona Brown explores the history of this recurring impulse.            ?           
            Back-to-the-landers have often been viewed as nostalgic escapists or romantic nature-lovers. But their own words reveal a more complex story. In such projects as Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City,” and Helen and Scott Nearing’s quest for “the good life,” Brown finds that the return to the farm has meant less a going-backwards than a going-forwards, a way to meet the challenges of the modern era. Progressive reformers pushed for homesteading to help impoverished workers get out of unhealthy urban slums. Depression-era back-to-the-landers, wary of the centralizing power of the New Deal, embraced a new “third way” politics of decentralism and regionalism. Later still, the movement merged with environmentalism. To understand Americans’ response to these back-to-the-land ideas, Brown turns to the fan letters of ordinary readers—retired teachers and overworked clerks, recent immigrants and single women. In seeking their rural roots, Brown argues, Americans have striven above all for the independence and self-sufficiency they associate with the agrarian ideal.
 
 
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Citește tot Restrânge

Din seria Studies in American Thought and Culture

  • Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department's Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent
    Preț: 20805 lei
  • Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States
    Preț: 16868 lei
  • Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650–1950
    Preț: 15278 lei
  • Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H. H. Bennett's Wisconsin Dells
    Preț: 14287 lei
  • Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age
    Preț: 23911 lei
  • Seaway to the Future: American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal
    Preț: 27397 lei
  • Thoreau’s Democratic Withdrawal: Alienation, Participation, and Modernity
    Preț: 18696 lei
  • The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online
    Preț: 21800 lei
  • 11% Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action
    Preț: 20641 lei
  • The University and the People: Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest
    Preț: 25778 lei
  • Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties
    Preț: 23197 lei
  • American Evangelicals and the 1960s
    Preț: 25848 lei
  • The Education of an Anti-Imperialist: Robert La Follette and U.S. Expansion
    Preț: 30942 lei
  • The Cross of War: Christian Nationalism and U.S. Expansion in the Spanish-American War
    Preț: 22914 lei
  • The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy
    Preț: 19663 lei
  • 11% Channeling the Past: Politicizing History in Postwar America
    Preț: 23013 lei
  • 11% Faithful Passages: American Catholicism in Literary Culture, 1844–1931
    Preț: 22876 lei
  • 13% Into New Territory: American Historians and the Concept of US Imperialism
    Preț: 26716 lei

Preț: 17896 lei

Nou

Puncte Express: 268
Preț estimativ în valută:
3425€ • 3558$ • 2845£

Carte tipărită la comandă

Livrare economică 03-17 februarie 25

 Adaugă în coș

Wish list
Gift list
Am citit!
Adaugă în listă
Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76

Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780299250744
ISBN-10: 0299250741
Pagini: 296
Ilustrații: 21 b-w illus.
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.42 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: University of Wisconsin Press
Colecția University of Wisconsin Press
Seria Studies in American Thought and Culture

Recenzii

“What a splendid account of a movement that’s usually caricatured. It taught me a lot about my state of Vermont, but also about the political and committed history of back-to-the-landers across American history. Forget your stereotype of the rugged individualist: this story turns out to be a lot more interesting than that!”—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

“A compelling work of extraordinary richness—a singular quilt of Americana concerning those who lived the ever-changing back-to-the-land movement and those who wrote about it as well. Cultural and agricultural history are happily wed here.”—Michael Kammen, Cornell University

“A useful corrective to the idea that the country living movement is strictly an effort to get right with Mother Earth.”—The Wilson Quarterly

“In historian Dona Brown, the back-to-the-land movement has found its supremely elegant and most empathetic chronicler. Brown lifts the movement out of its now obscure classical origin—the late-19th-century US—and foregrounds it in modern American contemporary concerns, such as food security, organic farming, and renewable energy. She does this so deftly that her work at once reads as a scholarly account of Americans’ enduring romance with the countryside as well as a nostalgia-filled, emancipatory anthem to ‘Jefferson bumpkins.’ More importantly, her deeply researched work debunks the simplistic reading of the back-to-the-landers as seekers of hippie nirvana in country life. . . . Summing Up: Essential.” —CHOICE

“Back to the Land is well researched, smoothly written, and often sharp and witty. The book does not engage with Vermont history specifically throughout its length, but Vermont and neighboring New England states play prominent roles in many of the stories that Brown tells. There is a great deal here to appeal to audiences from a range of backgrounds and with a range of historical interests. . . .[T]oday’s back-to-the-landers will want to spend time reading and thinking about Brown’s findings while they get down to the practical business of living and writing the next chapter in this longer American story.”—Vermont History

Notă biografică

Dona Brown is associate professor of history at the University of Vermont and author of Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century.
 

Cuprins

List of Illustrations   
Acknowledgments   
Introduction   
Part 1: The First American Back-to-the-Land Movement
1. The Back-to-the-Land Project   
2. Adventures in Contentment: Some Back-to-the-Land Writers and Their Readers   
3. Who Wants a Farm?   
4. From Little Lands to Suburban Farms   
    Coda: Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City   
Part 2: Returning to Back to the Land
5. Subsistence Homesteads: The New Deal Goes Back to the Land   
    Coda: Ralph Borsodi Rejects the New Deal   
6. "I'll Take My Stand" (in Vermont): Decentralizing the Back-to-the-Land Movement   
    Coda: The Nearings Invent Their Own Vermont   
7. Back to the Garden: The 1970s   
Epilogue: Home, Land, Security   
Notes   
Index

Descriere

Back-to-the-landers have often been viewed as nostalgic escapists or romantic nature-lovers. But their own words and those of their readers reveal a more complex story. The return to the farm, Dona Brown finds, means less a going-backwards than a going-forwards, a way to meet the challenges of the modern era. In seeking their rural roots, Americans strive above all for the self-sufficiency they associate with the agrarian ideal.