front cover of The Annotated Wuthering Heights
The Annotated Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Harvard University Press, 2014

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has been called the most beautiful, most profoundly violent love story of all time. At its center are Catherine and Heathcliff, and the self-contained world of Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, and the wild Yorkshire moors that the characters inhabit. “I am Heathcliff,” Catherine declares. In her introduction Janet Gezari examines Catherine’s assertion and in her notes maps it to questions that flicker like stars in the novel’s dark dreamscape. How do we determine who and what we are? What do the people closest to us contribute to our sense of identity?

The Annotated Wuthering Heights provides those encountering the novel for the first time—as well as those returning to it—with a wide array of contexts in which to read Brontë’s romantic masterpiece. Gezari explores the philosophical, historical, economic, political, and religious contexts of the novel and its connections with Brontë’s other writing, particularly her poems. The annotations unpack Brontë’s allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, and her other reading; elucidate her references to topics including folklore, educational theory, and slavery; translate the thick Yorkshire dialect of Joseph, the surly, bigoted manservant at the Heights; and help with other difficult or unfamiliar words and phrases.

Handsomely illustrated with many color images that vividly recreate both Brontë’s world and the earlier Yorkshire setting of her novel, this newly edited and annotated text will delight and instruct the scholar and general reader alike.

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Blood Kin
A Novel
Mark Powell
University of Tennessee Press, 2006
Set in the South Carolina foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the late summer of 1970, Blood Kin tells the story of the Burden family and the community of outcasts that surrounds them. James Burden is the eldest son in the Burden family. A Korean War veteran and former prisoner-of-war, he struggles with inner demons and drug addiction. He has returned home after almost two decades of absence to find his family members consumed with struggles all their own. His former wife is haunted by her thoughts of an unborn child. His brothers, both Vietnam veterans, are troubled by their experiences there. Roy Burden returned a hero, while Enis Burden saw no combat at all. The younger brothers are also dealing with troubles with love and the hopes of starting their own families. James’s father is himself disturbed by his memories of his own father’s dark deeds and death. And James’s mother is plagued by worry for her husband and sons. The Burdens face their struggles within a community of misfits, including a reluctant sheriff, a runaway thief, a forgotten fire-talker, a religious con man and his actress girlfriend, a local apple baron, and a failed prophet. All of them are living on the fringes of a rural South racing toward a middle-class modernity that has little use for any of them. Blood Kin was awarded the 2005 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, an award named for one of the South’s most celebrated writers. The annual prize, co-sponsored by the Knoxville Writers’ Guild and the University of Tennessee Press, endeavors to bring to light novels of high literary quality, thereby honoring Peter Taylor’s own practice of assisting writers who care about the craft of fiction.
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Days on the Family Farm
From the Golden Age through the Great Depression
Carrie A. Meyer
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

From the beginning of the twentieth century to World War II, farm wife May Lyford Davis kept a daily chronicle that today offers a window into a way of life that has all but disappeared. May and her husband Elmo lived through two decades of prosperity, the Great Depression, and two World Wars in their Midwestern farming community. Like many women of her time, Davis kept diaries that captured the everyday events of the family farm; she also kept meticulous farming accounts. In doing so, she left an extraordinary record that reflects not only her own experiences but also the history of early twentieth-century American agriculture.

May and Elmo’s story, engagingly told by Carrie A. Meyer, showcases the large-scale evolution of agriculture from horses to automobile and tractors, a surprisingly vibrant family and community life, and the business of commercial farming. Details such as what items were bought and sold, what was planted and harvested, the temperature and rainfall, births and deaths, and the direction of the wind are gathered to reveal a rich picture of a world shared by many small farmers.

With sustainable and small-scale farming again on the rise in the United States, Days on the Family Farm resonates with both the profound and mundane aspects of rural life—past and present—in the Midwest.

Carrie A. Meyer is associate professor of economics at George Mason University.

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Debt and Dispossession
Farm Loss in America's Heartland
Kathryn Marie Dudley
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Winner of the Margaret Mead Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology

The farm crisis of the 1980s was the worst economic disaster to strike rural America since the Depression—thousands of farmers lost their land and homes, irrevocably altering their communities and, as Kathryn Marie Dudley shows, giving rise to devastating social trauma that continues to affect farmers today. Through interviews with residents of an agricultural county in western Minnesota, Dudley provides an incisive account of the moral dynamics of loss, dislocation, capitalism, and solidarity in farming communities.
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Driving the Body Back
Mary Swander
University of Iowa Press, 1998

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The Farm on Badger Creek
Memories of a Midwest Girlhood
Peggy Prilaman Marxen
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021
Peggy Prilaman Marxen grew up near the town of Meteor in northwestern Wisconsin’s Sawyer County, isolated by geography yet surrounded by close-knit extended family. Multiple generations of her family witnessed changes to rural Wisconsin that altered the fabric of their lives and the lives of all in their community, including the introduction of new farming techniques, school consolidation, and revolutions in transportation and technology. They supplemented their subsistence herd of dairy cows by hunting, fishing, and selling timber and maple syrup. For many years, her home, like those of her neighbors, lacked indoor plumbing, electricity, and a telephone. As a young child, Peggy attended a one-room schoolhouse and walked, biked, or sledded the three miles to school and back, no matter the weather. 
 
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Fate and Honor, Family and Village
Demographic and Cultural Change in Rural Italy Since 1800
Rudolph M. Bell
University of Chicago Press, 1979
The Italian peasantry has often been described as tragic, backward, hopeless, downtrodden, static, and passive. In Fate and Honor, Family and Village, Rudolph Bell argues against the characterizationmore by reconstructing the complete demographic history of four country villages since 1800. He analyzes births, marriages, and deaths in terms of four concepts that capture mroe accurately and sympathetically the essence of the Italian peasant life: fortuna (fate), onore (honor, dignity), famiglia (family), and campanilismo (village).

Fortuna is the cultural wellspring of Italian peasant society, the world view from which all social life flows. The concept of fortuna does not refer to philosophical questions, predestination, or value judgments. Rather, fortuna is the sum total of all explanations of outcomes perceived to be beyond human control. Thus, in Bell's view, high mortality does not lead peasants to a resigned acceptance of their fate; instead, they rely on honor, reciprocal exchanges of favors, and marriage to forge new links in their familial and social networks. With thorough documentation in graphs and tables, the author evaluates peasant reactions to time, work, family, space, migration, and protest to portray rural Italians as active, flexible, and shrewd, participating fully in shaping their destinies.

Bell asserts that the real problem of the Mezzogiorno is not one of resistance to technology, of high birth rates, or even of illiteracy. It is one of solving technical questions in ways that foster dependency. The historical and sociological practice of treating peasant culture as backward, secondary, and circumscribed only encourages disruption and ultimately blocks the road to economic and political justice in a postmodern world.
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Fostering on the Farm
Child Placement in the Rural Midwest
Megan Birk
University of Illinois Press, 2019
From 1870 until after World War I, reformers led an effort to place children from orphanages, asylums, and children's homes with farming families. The farmers received free labor in return for providing room and board. Reformers, meanwhile, believed children learned lessons in family life, citizenry, and work habits that institutions simply could not provide.
 
Drawing on institution records, correspondence from children and placement families, and state reports, Megan Birk scrutinizes how the farm system developed--and how the children involved may have become some of America's last indentured laborers. Between 1850 and 1900, up to one-third of farm homes contained children from outside the family. Birk reveals how the nostalgia attached to misplaced perceptions about healthy, family-based labor masked the realities of abuse, overwork, and loveless upbringings endemic in the system. She also considers how rural people cared for their own children while being bombarded with dependents from elsewhere. Finally, Birk traces how the ills associated with rural placement eventually forced reformers to transition to a system of paid foster care, adoptions, and family preservation.
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Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier
Cynthia Culver Prescott
University of Arizona Press, 2007
As her family traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852, Mary Ellen Todd taught herself to crack the ox whip. Though gender roles often blurred on the trail, families quickly tried to re-establish separate roles for men and women once they had staked their claims. For Mary Ellen Todd, who found a “secret joy in having the power to set things moving,” this meant trading in the ox whip for the more feminine butter churn.

In Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier, Cynthia Culver Prescott expertly explores the shifting gender roles and ideologies that countless Anglo-American settlers struggled with in Oregon’s Willamette Valley between 1845 and 1900. Drawing on traditional social history sources as well as divorce records, married women’s property records, period photographs, and material culture, Prescott reveals that Oregon settlers pursued a moving target of middle-class identity in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Prescott traces long-term ideological changes, arguing that favorable farming conditions enabled Oregon families to progress from accepting flexible frontier roles to participating in a national consumer culture in only one generation. As settlers’ children came of age, participation in this new culture of consumption and refined leisure became the marker of the middle class. Middle-class culture shifted from the first generation’s emphasis on genteel behavior to a newer genteel consumption.

This absorbing volume reveals the shifting boundaries of traditional women’s spheres, the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, and the second generation’s struggle to balance their parents’ ideology with a changing national sense of class consciousness.
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The Last of the Husbandmen
A Novel of Farming Life
Gene Logsdon
Ohio University Press, 2008

“Nan turned to see Ben’s face turn as hard and white as a sauerkraut crock. When he did not respond, Nan figured that he was just going to back off as he usually did, the shy and retiring husbandman. She did not know her history. She did not know that shy and retiring husbandmen have been known to revolt against oppression with pitchforks drawn.”
The Last of the Husbandmen

In The Last of the Husbandmen, Gene Logsdon looks to his own roots in Ohio farming life to depict the personal triumphs and tragedies, clashes and compromises, and abiding human character of American farming families and communities. From the Great Depression, when farmers tilled the fields with plow horses, to the corporate farms and government subsidy programs of the present, this novel presents the complex transformation of a livelihood and of a way of life.

Two friends, one rich by local standards, and the other of more modest means, grow to manhood in a lifelong contest of will and character. In response to many of the same circumstances—war, love, moonshining, the Klan, weather, the economy—their different approaches and solutions to dealing with their situations put them at odds with each other, but we are left with a deeper understanding of the world that they have inherited and have chosen.

Part morality play and part personal recollection, The Last of the Husbandmen is both a lighthearted look at the past and a profound statement about the present state of farming life. It is also a novel that captures the spirit of those who have chosen to work the land they love.

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Others Had It Worse
Sour Dock, Moonshine, and Hard Times in Davis County, Iowa
Vetra Melrose Padget Covert and Chris D. Baker
University of Iowa Press, 2013
In 1977, while studying journalism at the University of Iowa, Chris Baker gave his grandmother a notebook and asked her to write about her childhood. Years later, long after her death in 1990, he found the tattered yellow notebook. In twenty-nine handwritten pages, the woman he knew as Grandma Covert had recorded her younger life in rural Iowa between 1920 and 1929. Writing about herself from the ages of four to thirteen, Vetra Covert sent a simple message back to her grandson: “That’s just the way it was. Others had it worse. We got by.”
 
Captivated by this glimpse of a woman very different from the more formidable grandmother of his memory, Chris Baker reframed Vetra’s journal to create a narrative of her childhood and a window into rural Iowa life in the 1920s. Transcribing her words into nine chapters that illuminate home, family, neighbors, school, and social life, he has composed a collection of candid, whimsical, sometimes ornery stories that will resonate with anyone who has ever tried to decipher the lives found in old letters and photos.
 
Vetra’s was not a romantic little-house-on-the-prairie childhood. She grew up with seven brothers and sisters (every new baby was “a supprise”) in a dilapidated log cabin near a small town now vanished from the Iowa map. Two rooms up, two rooms down, no plumbing, no electricity, holes in the roof and floor so big “you could of throwed a cat through them.” Her father was a bootlegger-farmer who measured his corn yield in gallons, not bushels, a moonshiner occasionally harassed by federal agents. Although family stories now present him as a quaint old-timer, the reality of living with him was much starker.
 
In his introduction to Vetra’s recollections, Chris Baker reveals the harsh truths underlying her authentic, uncomplaining account. By honoring her legacy, he discovered a newfound respect for her and for her family’s ability to survive despite the devastating forces of poverty, isolation, and the looming Great Depression. Together he and his grandmother have created an enduring chapter in family history.

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Prairie Gothic
The Story of a West Texas Family
John R. Erickson
University of North Texas Press, 2005

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The Quiet Season
Remembering Country Winters
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013

The Quiet Season
Remembering Country Winters
Jerry Apps
 
“As I think back to the days of my childhood, the frost-covered windows in my bedroom,
the frigid walks to the country school, the excitement of a blizzard, and a hundred other memories, I realize that these experiences left an indelible mark on me and made me who I am today.”—From the Introduction

Jerry Apps recalls winters growing up on a farm in central Wisconsin during the latter years of the Depression and through World War II. Before electricity came to this part of Waushara County, farmers milked cows by hand with the light of a kerosene lantern, woodstoves heated the drafty farm homes, and “making wood” was a major part of every winter’s work. The children in Jerry’s rural community walked to a country school that was heated with a woodstove and had no indoor plumbing. Wisconsin winters then were a time of reflection, of planning for next year, and of families drawing together. Jerry describes how winter influenced farm families and suggests that those of us who grow up with harsh northern winters are profoundly affected in ways we often are not aware.

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Six Generations Here
A Farm Family Remembers
Marjorie McLellan
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1997

Six Generations Here: A Farm Family Remembers
by Marjorie L. McLellan, with an essay by Kathleen Neils Conzen and a foreword by Dan Freas

Discover the story of the Krueger family, as images of farm, family, and landscape reveal the struggles of rural immigrant life in Wisconsin. Drawing on snapshots, memorabilia, and interviews, Six Generations Here brings together the voices of the past and the present to create a distinctive portrait of Wisconsin farm life.
Leaving their German home in 1851, the Kruegers came to America for economic opportunity. But like other immigrant families, they struggled to make ends meet. Only with the whole family helping out did they manage to get their Watertown farm up and running. By the turn of the century, they had achieved a life of middle-class comfort in the midst of the rigors of dairy farming. Over the generations, the Kruegers incorporated their past traditions with the needs of the present, adapting to the challenges of rural American life and, when necessary, breaking from the past. Despite these changes, their commitment to hard work and family persisted, shaped their identity, and ensured their success.
Through photographs, documents, and family stories, the Kruegers left a deep history of who they were and how they sought to be remembered. Follow their family through six generations as they compile a rich and varied record of Wisconsin life.

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Village and Family in Contemporary China
William L. Parish and Martin King Whyte
University of Chicago Press, 1978
After 1949 the Chinese Communists carried out land reform, the collectivization of agriculture, and the formation of people's communes. The new economic and political organizations that emerged have made peasant life more comfortable and secure, but many economic and status differentials and traditional customs remain resistant to change. Focusing on rural Kwangtung province, William L. Parish and Martin King Whyte examine the rural work-incentive system, village equality and inequality, rural health care and education, marriage customs, and the position of women, among other topics, to determine what and how much of the traditional Chinese ways of life is left in Communist China.
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