Introduction: Agriculture and Rural Life in Kentucky

Writing in 1955, the historian Richard Hofstadter famously noted: "The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city." What Hofstadter observed was in some ways obvious to a nation just beginning to build a network of interstate highways that would allow car-bound Americans to speed through the countryside from city to city. For Hofstadter, however, the transformation of a once largely rural, almost entirely agricultural nation to one of cities and industry was at the heart of the story of how modern America came to be. In explaining American history this way, he took aim at historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner and John D. Hicks who rooted the story of political and social change in the settling of unsettled lands or the creative impact of agrarian movements such as the Populist Party of the 1890s. Many historians who followed Hofstadter produced rich historical accounts of the urbanization of America, the men and women who worked in the new industrial cities, and the millions of rural and European immigrants who swelled the size of American cities. Flourishing sub-disciplines such as urban history, working-class history, and immigration history took to heart the idea that Americans had indeed moved to the city.¹

Historians, to be sure, continued to write in the field of "agricultural history." There were splendid accounts of subjects such as agrarian insurgencies and the politics of farm policy but much of what might be labeled agricultural history was the history of improved farming methods, biological innovation, and gains in output and productivity. A good deal of this work came from economic historians skilled at applying quantitative tools to measuring and analyzing productivity of land, labor, and inputs. Very often, this was the history of how American agriculture became more capital intensive and more capitalistic. It was an agriculture dependent on biologically altered seeds and animals, ever newer forms of mechanical power, and fewer and larger farms.² In two-hundred years' time, the percentage of Americans living on farms had fallen 70 percent to about 2 percent. By the year 2000, the number of farms had fallen from a high of 6.5 million in 1935 to about 2.2 million and of these remaining farms, about two or three hundred thousand now produce 70 percent or more of the agricultural goods sold commercially each year.³

Rich as this history is, it is only part of the history of rural people, their communities, and their world. Realizing this, historians for some time now have been exploring what Jack Temple Kirby called "rural worlds lost."⁴ A truly rural history for these historians had to be about more than just fewer and bigger farms or the advent of tractors and hybridization.⁵ Rural history has become a vibrant field in which scholars often question this seemingly straightforward narrative of ever larger corporations, newer technologies, and cutting-edge science. They resituate rural worlds in local places, constructing narratives from rural sources that can challenge, contradict, or verify assumptions about rurality. Rural history is often unexpected. It asks difficult questions that have no ready answers. And scholars who pursue it regularly engage with other fields, like gender, the environment, race, region, or politics to produce rich conversations that both incorporate and move beyond the "cows and plows" that some wrongly assume comprise the bulk of scholarship on rural America.

This history of rural life emerged from many sources. One was the work of European historians and geographers who realized that the history of agricultural change ignored the social and cultural history of the countryside.⁶ A second source has been the work of rural sociologists and anthropologists who long studied rural societies and who have often led the way in exploring and documenting America's rural past (and present). These scholars have explored and documented the world of communities built on reciprocal exchange rather than hyper-consumption and the accumulation of capital. They have also had much to say about the values and lives of those who resisted agricultural change and...