This is a collection of stories about growing up in rural Kipling, Northern Ontario, Canada in the 50s and 60s. Some of them are true, some have a hint of truth, and some are products of the author's vivid imagination...

Wayne Erbsen's newest book takes a deep look at bluegrass music to uncover its true roots: ballads of early pioneers, Scots-Irish fiddle tunes, black spirituals, plantations melodies, blues, murder ballads, sentimental parlor songs from Tin Pan Alley, North Carolina banjo styles and gospel songs. the book is richly illustrated with over 100 vintage photos and includes lyrics, musical notation, chords, history and playing tips to 94 songs. There are also nearly 80 pages of history and profiles portraying important musicians including the Monroe Brothers, Carter Family, Bradley Kincaid, Riley Puckett, Charlie Poole, Wade & J.E. Mainer, Vernon Dalhart, Carolina Tar Heels, G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter, Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, Ernest V. Stoneman, Blue Sky Boys, Fiddlin' John Carson, Coon Creek Girls, Earl Scruggs, Eck Robertson, Callahan Brothers, Samantha Bumgarner, Bill Monroe Zeke & Wiley Morris, Jimmie Rodgers and Stringbean. Optional CD by Wayne Erbsen and Laura Boosinger is available containing fourteen songs from the book.

From pre-settlement days to the present, Our Rural Roots relates the history and personal experiences of southwestern Minnesota residents. The third of a five-volume series, including more than twenty years of articles first published in the Marshall Independent Newspaper, this volume explores clothing, the impact of weather, business leaders, female leaders, holidays, and farm home memories

This book studies how, in the Far West, Americans moved from communal values to individualistic and exploitative ones.

China’s economic and military rise dominates discussions of the world’s most populous country. Resilient authoritarian government is credited with great successes, but this book expands the discourse to include governance by village heads - who often ignored central politicians. Chinese reforms for prosperity started circa 1970 under rural and suburban leaders. They could act autonomously then because of unexpected political and technological opportunities. Their localization of power eroded socialist controls. Since 1990, central leaders have tried to reverse reforms made by resilient local bosses. New findings, especially from the Yangzi delta around Shanghai, challenge the top-down approach to thinking about governance. As Deng Xiaoping admitted, the nation’s spurt of prosperity began in local communities rather than Beijing. Reforms for triple-cropping and rural industrialization started long before Mao’s death (not in 1978, the date most writers cite). Country factories competed with state industries for materials and markets. Shortages by the 1980s led to inflation, government deficits, unofficial credit, unenforceable planning, illegal migrations, then international exports - and severe political tensions. After 1990, Party leaders sought policies to build a Leninist regime that is mostly post-socialist. These reactionary changes have lasted into the era of Xi Jinping. China’s reforms and subsequent changes can be understood as results of unintended situations not just ideas, and local not just central politics. This book will interest students and scholars of Chinese, as well as any readers who wonder about comparative development.

From ancient myths to pop culture to profiles of domestic breeds, "Extraordinary Goats" explores the many facets of the goat.

In the 1970s, Thailand was developing but poor and largely agrarian. By the 1980s it had become the fastest growing large economy in the world and, in the process, made the transformation from a low-income to a middle-income economy. Fast forward to 2010 and Thailand had climbed yet another rung in the development ladder to become, according to World Bank criteria, an upper middle-income economy. Throughout this period of economic and social transformation, contrary to historical experience and theoretical models, one thing has remained constant: the central role of Thai smallholder farming. This conundrum—the persistence of the smallholder in a time of extraordinary change—lies at the heart of this book. In More than Rural author Jonathan Rigg explores how people in the countryside have adapted to their changing world, the new opportunities available, and the consequences for rural life and living. The Thai government has successfully “developed” the countryside, but with unexpected results. New household forms have emerged, women have become mobile in a manner few expected, and relations between rural and urban have changed. Yet the smallholder has persisted, and Rigg’s attempts to understand why offer a fresh perspective on Thailand’s development. Setting aside the urban, industrial point of view that we so often privilege, Rigg asks different questions about Thailand’s development. What if, he wonders, the present changes are not simply way stations, transitions to the main act of urbanization? What if they represent a new form of rural livelihood? Rigg’s thoughtful, nuanced approach to agrarian change—viewing the countryside as more than agriculture, the rural as more than the countryside, and rural people as more than farmers—offers insights into Thailand’s wider transformations (class identities, intergenerational relations), its political impasse, and more. Based on over three-and-a-half decades of fieldwork in seventeen villages, across three regions, and encompassing more than one thousand households, and a deep knowledge of primary and published sources, More than Rural is a significant work with implications for contemporary development across Asia and the global South.

After Ross Benes left Nebraska for New York, he witnessed his polite home state become synonymous with “Trump country.” Long dismissed as “flyover” land, the area where he was born and raised suddenly became the subject of TV features and frequent opinion columns. With the rural-urban divide overtaking the national conversation, Benes knew what he had to do: he had to go home. In Rural Rebellion Benes explores Nebraska’s shifting political landscape to better understand what’s plaguing America. He clarifies how Nebraska defies red-state stereotypes while offering readers insights into how a frontier state with a tradition of nonpartisanship succumbed to the hardened right. Extensive interviews with US senators, representatives, governors, state lawmakers, and other power brokers illustrate how local disputes over health-care coverage and education funding became microcosms for our current national crisis. Rural Rebellion is also the story of one man coming to terms with both his past and present. Benes writes about the dissonance of moving from the most rural and conservative region of the country to its most liberal and urban centers as they grow further apart at a critical moment in history. He seeks to bridge America’s current political divides by contrasting the conservative values he learned growing up in a town of three hundred with those of his liberal acquaintances in New York City, where he now lives. At a time when social and political differences are too often portrayed in stark binary terms, and people in the Trump-supporting heartland are depicted in reductive, one-dimensional ways, Benes tells real-life stories to add depth and nuance to our understanding of rural Americans’ attitudes about abortion, immigration, big government, and other contentious issues. His argument and conclusion are simple but powerful: that Americans in disparate places would be less hostile to one another if they just knew each other a little better. Part memoir, journalism, and social science, Rural Rebellion is a book for our times.

2012 IACP Award Winner in the Food Matters category Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point? Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurants. Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a who's who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents' medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years. Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well as an expose of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.