Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain - Softcover

Stock, Catherine McNicol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501714031 ISBN 13: 9781501714030

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Through its history, populism has meant hope and progress, as well as hate and a desire to turn back the clock on American history. In her new preface, Catherine McNicol Stock provides an update and overview of the conservative face of rural America. She paints a comprehensive portrait of a long line of rural activists whose crusades against big government, bug business, and big banks sometimes spoke in a language of progressive populism and sometimes in a language of hate and bigotry. Rural Radicals breaks down the populism expressed by activists, confronts our conventional notions of right and left, and allows us to understand political factionalism differently.

About this title

Review:

A historian at Connecticut College, Stock identifies a long-standing strain of extremist rage in the rural heartland of America which informs the current right-wing militia groups, the survivalists, and the Christian Identity zealots. She suggests that ignorance and denial of this cultural are what made the Oklahoma bombing such a shock. She cites examples like Nathaniel Bacon's rebel group in colonial days, and the uprising led by Daniel Shays in Pennsylvania in George Washington's time, as exemplars of hatred of federal authority and federal taxes, and of an ugly rural cultural isolationism. In time, fed by economic insecurity, gun craziness, and crude machismo, this would manifest itself in hatred of Indians, blacks, Mormons, Mexicans, and Asians--an enduring contradiction of American idealism.

From the Publisher:

This is an important book, which gives historical perspective on a topic that will only gain attention in the coming months. Catherine McNicol Stock is Associate Professor of History and Director of the American Studies Program at Connecticut College. An alternate selection of the History Book Club. She is the author of Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501714031
• ISBN 13: 9781501714030
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250