Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Sociology - Rural

With this book Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Gopa Samanta offer an intimate glimpse into the microcosmic world of "hybrid environments." Focusing on chars--the part-land, part-water, low-lying sandy masses that exist within the riverbeds in the floodplains of lower Bengal--the authors show how, both as real-life examples and as metaphors, chars straddle the conventional categories of land and water, and how people who live on them fluctuate between legitimacy and illegitimacy. The result, a study of human habitation in the nebulous space between land and water, charts a new way of thinking about...

For many Americans, the Midwest is a vast unknown. In Remaking the Heartland, Robert Wuthnow sets out to rectify this. He shows how the region has undergone extraordinary social transformations over the past half-century and proven itself surprisingly resilient in the face of such hardships as the Great Depression and the movement of residents to other parts of the country. He examines the heartland's reinvention throughout the decades and traces the social and economic factors that have helped it to survive and prosper.

Wuthnow points to the critical strength of the...

Beginning in Kent in the summer of 1830 before spreading throughout the country, the Swing Riots were the most dramatic and widespread rising of the English rural poor. Seeking an end to their immiseration, the protestors destroyed machines, demanded higher wages, and more generous poor relief, and even frequently resorted to incendiarism to enforce their modest demands. But occurring against a backdrop of revolutions in continental Europe and a political crisis, Swing to many represented a genuine challenge to the existing ruling order, provoking a bitter and bloody repression. The Rural...

Hailed in her native Campbell County, Tennessee, as the Mother Teresa of the coal country, Tilda Kemplen was a teacher, activist, and founder and executive director of Mountain Communities Child Care and Development Centers (MCCCDC). In recognition of her work on behalf of impoverished children and families in central Appalachia, Kemplen was presented in 1980 with the American Institute for Public Service s Jefferson Award for Outstanding Public Service Benefi ting Local Communities.

Kemplen movingly describes her struggles to educate herself, her years as a teacher in rural schools and...