At Home in the Hoosier Hills: Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810-1870

At Home in the Hoosier Hills: Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810-1870

This book explores the lives and worldviews of Indiana's southern hill-country residents during much of the 19th century. Focusing on local institutions, political, economic, and religious, it gives voice to the plain farmers of the region and reveals the world as they saw it. For them, faith in local institutions reflected a distrust of distant markets and politicians. Localism saw its expression in the Democratic Party's anti-federalist strain, in economic practices such as "safety-first" farming which focused on taking care of the family first, and in non-perfectionist Christianity. Localism was both a means of resisting changes and the basis of a worldview that helped Hoosiers of the hill country negotiate these changes. "[1]. Important family studies include Anya Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998); Shawn Johansen, Family Men: Middle―Class Fatherhood in Industrializing America (New York: Routledge, 2001); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988). For an overview and assessment of changing family relations in the early republic, with references to early Indiana, see Ginette Aley, Westward Expansion, John Tipton, and the Emergence of the American Midwest, 180"―1839" (Ph.D. diss., Iowa State University, 2005), chapter 5; Ginette Aley, "Grist, Grit, and Rural Society in the Early "As for politics, southern Indiana farmers found support for their vision of egalitarianism and a localist world in the Democratic Party. Here, the multifaceted nature of hill country localism is more clearly identifiable. For example, Nation points out the complexities surrounding the Temperance movement, explaining that the issue went beyond wet versus dry. It was infused not only with moral overtones, but also with economic anxiety when it came down to the potential for lost income in the move to remove whiskey as one way to market corn. In this and other fights, southern Hoosiers sought unremittingly to ensure that localism was maintained (p. 185). Yet, transformative changes were in the offing that would chip away at the power of localism to hold sway over the hill country including the railroad, renewed westward expansion, and, ultimately, the Civil War. Overall, At Home in the Hoosier Hills offers important insight on an overlooked aspect of Indiana and Midwest history and should be read eagerly with this in mind. Indeed Nation's research is admirable, regardless of this reviewer's quarrels with the book's format and some depictions. This volume will be a valuable part of any number of different course reading lists."― Indiana , May 2006 "Moreover, scholars would do well to avoid employing phraseology that separates women from being farmers. To say, for example, the farmer and his wife (p. 111) is somewhat sexist and implies that the wife is not a farmer even though her agricultural activities have just been detailed by the author. They are farm people―farm men and farm wome"―or farmers, or husbands and wives. Unfortunately this problematic language is more common in academic scholarshi "More problematic is the treatment of farm women. The field of rural women's history has expanded to include far more insight than is acknowledged here. Can it really be that it was simple materialism and not a sense of accomplishment, farming knowledge, or partnership in the family farming enterprise that actuated women toward market interaction and determined their economic activities? To purchase more cotton goods, Nation states, Hoosier women seem to have shifted the emphasis of their production onto butter and eggs (p. 110, emphasis added). This almost sounds like the pi"―money" justification for women's work in the early twentieth century and sadly overlooks many important studies on rural women. While farm women clearly enjoyed the fruits of the market when they were available, to state that materialism drove their agricultural activity is to deny them a sense of (family) ente "Nation contends that the pursuit and preference of local moral regulation was even more apparent in the hill country's agricultural economy which centered on hog and corn farming. Hoosiers' primary, risk―averse strategy was safet"―first agriculture" in which the family's needs were met first. Surplus produce could be sent to distant markets, although Nation frequently asserts that the hill country "feared" these markets because they were ou "Using land, census, and tax records, several personal accounts, and county sampling, Nation begins by carefully relating the centrality of land to the early Indiana (and Midwest) story. Almost all these early settlers came to farm, he correctly points out (p. 16). Moreover, the communities that developed in the hill country revolved around family farming. In keeping with the study's persistent theme of local governance, Nation casts the f