Grassroots Leviathan - Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic

How a massive agricultural reform movement led by northern farmers before the Civil War recast Americans' relationships to market forces and the state.
Recipient of The Center for Civil War Research's 2021 Wiley-Silver Book Prize, Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society
In this sweeping look at rural society from the American Revolution to the Civil War, Ariel Ron argues that agricultural history is central to understanding the nation's formative period. Upending the myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South, Grassroots Leviathan traces the rise of a powerful agricultural reform movement spurred by northern farmers. Ron shows that farming dominated the lives of most Americans through almost the entire nineteenth century and traces how middle-class farmers in the "Greater Northeast" built a movement of semipublic agricultural societies, fairs, and periodicals that fundamentally recast Americans' relationship to market forces and the state.

About the author

Ariel Ron is the Glenn M. Linden Assistant Professor of the U.S. Civil War Era at Southern Methodist University.

Product details

• Authors: Ariel Ron, Ariel (Assistant Professor of History Ron, Ariel (Associate Professor of History Ron
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.01.2023
• EAN: 9781421446721
• ISBN: 978-1-4214-4672-1
• No. of pages: 324
• Series: Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia; Studies in Early American Econ
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Business > General, dictionaries; BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economic History, HISTORY / United States / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Agriculture & Food, Economic history, Cultural studies: food & society, History of the Americas