Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Sociology - Rural

The American experience has been one of constant and accelerating change. Against this background, American cities have exerted a magnetic pull attracting streams of migration from rural to urban areas transforming a predominantly rural society into one in which 75 percent of the people live in urban areas. "Population and Community in Rural America" focuses on migration as the primary force for population change in rural America. Within smaller, more dispersed rural populations, any changes in the number of births or deaths, or movement in or out of the area impact community and family...

This volume examines the relationships between rural settlement processes and the spatial patterns they produce by mapping past and present patterns and tracing the historical processes which generated them. Using the historical records of Palestine (Eretz Israel), David Grossman reviews the settlement processes of bedouins (sedentarization and nomadization), Arab peasants (settlement fixation, migration, and frontier expansion of fallahin), and early Jewish settlers. Past records are traced back to the biblical period, and a survey of the literature dealing with British evidence of rural...

What makes a good neighborhood? Can one neighborhood be good for all people? Brower's study examines the variable image of the ideal residential area in contemporary and earlier writings, from utopian visions and popular media to historical records and the findings of social science research. Brower identifies four common ideal neighborhood types, each providing a distinct and specific residential experience that suits a particular way of life. He details the characteristics of each of these good neighborhoods, and argues that their coexistence in a single urban environment is not only...

Scholars bring their field experience and their expertise in sociology, social anthropology, economics, political science, and other areas to bear on an understanding of what happened to a model socialist construction: the rural village cooperative of Israel, the Moshav. A number of the chapters describe re-studies of communities their authors had examined a generation ago. The overall result is a diversity of views from the perspectives of individual community members, community organizations themselves, and expert interpreters, about the causes and consequences of a decline in economic...

With increasing awareness of the limits that natural resource reserves and environmental concerns impose on economic growth, rural sociologists have developed new ways of looking at the relationship between man and his environment. This volume surveys changing sociological views of that relationship and explores a holistic, cooperative model of human/nature interaction that reflects the needs of the post-industrial age. In their introduction Field and Burch review significant landmarks in natural resource sociology and comment on some of the underlying aims of rural sociology. The...

In Ranching, Mining, and the Human Impact of Natural Resource Development, Raymond L. Gold observes and reports on people whose lives have been significantly affected by the industrialization of rural communities in the American West. Such community change research is rarely done, so this classic study is invaluable for its real world groundings applicable to a variety of social science theories. The study evolved out of ethnographic research on Western communities done over a full decade.

This was the first work of its kind to examine and account for the rise of local...

The campstead is an American institution. After the Civil War, with neo-colonialism, environmentalism, and arts-and-crafts on the rise, some families sought rural locations for rustic camps. There they raised their children in the summertime. Around Squam Lake, after some eight generations, twenty-one such camps remain in these families.

The Squam area thus becomes a natural place to study relationships of persons and places, families and landscape, and humans and the world. Our present concerns for environmental stewardship, open space protection, and core values instead of...

Tennessee History Book Award Finalist The Upper Cumberland region of Kentucky and Tennessee, often regarded as isolated and out of pace with the rest of the country, has a far richer history and culture than has been documented. The contributors to Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland discuss an extensive array of subjects, including popular music, movies, architecture, folklore, religion, and literature. Seventeen original essays by prominent scholars such as Lynwood Montell, Charles Wolfe, Allison Ensor, and Jeannette Keith uncover fascinating stories and personalities as they...

Journalists and poets, economists and political historians, have told the story of Canada's railways, but their accounts pay little attention to the workers who built them. The Bunkhouse Man is the only study devoted to these men and their lives in construction camps; a pioneering work in sociology, it is still the best description of what it was like to be a working man in Canada before the First World War. E.W. Bradwin drew on his own experience as an instructor for Frontier College, working alongside his students during the day and teaching at night, to present this graphic...

"So, how do Americans in a small town make community today? This book argues that there is more than one answer, and that despite the continued importance of small-town stuff traditionally associated with face-to-face communities, it makes no sense to think that contemporary technological, economic, and cultural shifts have had no impact on the ways Americans practice community life. Instead, I found that different Viroquans took different approaches to making community that reflected different confluences of moral logics their senses of obligation to themselves, to their families, to...

"So, how do Americans in a small town make community today? This book argues that there is more than one answer, and that despite the continued importance of small-town stuff traditionally associated with face-to-face communities, it makes no sense to think that contemporary technological, economic, and cultural shifts have had no impact on the ways Americans practice community life. Instead, I found that different Viroquans took different approaches to making community that reflected different confluences of moral logics their senses of obligation to themselves, to their families, to...

Small farming communities are the heart and soul of America, but it's no secret that they're under siege. Family farms are disappearing and manufacturing is outsourced. Schools close, jobs vanish, and local stores can't survive. Some communities resort to giving away land just to get people to move there.

Richard Wood knows that rural communities need more than jobs or money to survive: they need to become valued again as desirable places to live. He takes a closer look at what has happened in several Kansas...