Religion in Rural
America
Co-Sponsored
by The Newberry Library, The University of Chicago, and Trinity Christian
College
Saturday, October 1, 2005, 11:00am-3:00pm
Admission is free, pre-registration is required. To register and receive copies of the papers, e-Mail scholl@newberry.org, or call 312.255.3524.
The following papers will be pre-circulated and discussed at the seminar:
Formed by Faith: the Dutch Immigrant
Community in the Southern San Joaquin Valley: 1890-1930
David Zwart,
Western Michigan University
This paper illuminates the importance of religion for Dutch Calvinists in the rural San Joaquin Valley in California in creating a community and ethnic identity. In 1890, Dutch immigrants began arriving in the Southern San Joaquin Valley to form farming colonies but within a decade these colonies collapsed. Nevertheless, agricultural jobs in the San Joaquin Valley would attract a number of Dutch immigrants after 1900. The founding of the Hanford Christian Reformed Church in 1908 enabled the community to consolidate the Dutch immigrants and connect with the broader Dutch-American community. The church maintained a separate identity in the heterogeneous population of the San Joaquin Valley.
Associating Churches: The Practice of
Christian Fellowship in the Central Mississippi Valley, 1820-1840
John
Ayabe, Saint Louis University
This paper examines the network of associations constructed by Baptist congregations in the Illinois and Missouri backcountry during the first half of the nineteenth century. The paper focuses on how these early settlers forged relationships among scattered congregations, the goals of associating, the rationale behind organized associations, and the way that the practice of Christian fellowship became an expression of religious identity. Congregations defined themselves by participating in or withdrawing from the channels of fellowship constructed by associating churches. In turn, Christian fellowship became a significant component of religious practice among Baptists in the western frontier.
Race in Rural
America
Co-Sponsored
by The Newberry Library, The University of Chicago, and Trinity Christian
College
Saturday, February 25, 2006, 11:00am-3:00pm
Admission is free, pre-registration is required. To register and receive copies of the papers, e-Mail scholl@newberry.org, or call 312.255.3524.
The following papers will be pre-circulated and discussed at the seminar:
"Building Up a Country of Their Own":
Garveyism and the African American Search for Rural Independence,
1920-1929
Jarod H. Roll, Northwestern University
Why was Marcus Garvey's black nationalism at the center of the civic lives of the thousands of African American farmers who moved into southeast Missouri's new cotton lands in the 1920s? This chapter examines the appeal of Garveyism among the relatively successful black male landowners and renters who led the migration to Missouri. I argue that Garveyism situated their search for agrarian independence within a radical movement for the liberation of the race and, at the same time, provided a top-down model of economic advancement that reinforced their paternalistic control of the social and work hierarchies within their communities.
Confederate Occupation and Freedom
Networks: Slaves, Freedpeople, and the Making of Emancipation
Justin
Behrend, Northwestern University
This paper explores the development of slaves and newly freedpeople's political consciousness during the Civil War. In particular, it focuses on the contours of communication networks among ordinary African Americans, and how they struggled to understand the implications of state power - both Confederate and Union - for their daily lives. Whether they chose to enlist in the army, work for wages on a distant plantation, or just to stay at home in the quarters, freedpeople redrew the lines that had once bounded their world, and they laid the foundation for a broad-based political community.
Race, Gender, and Land Ownership in the
Nineteenth Century: The Case of Tres Alamos, Arizona
Katherine
Benton-Cohen, Louisiana State University
Tiny Tres Alamos, Arizona, tells us what the Southwest might have become. The town's settlers, who included Mexicans, Germans, Euro-Americans, and African Americans, confound modern notions of race and nation. By the late 1860s, a broad base of land ownership fostered remarkable cooperation. In the face of Apache warfare, this diverse group considered itself "white" in relation to the Indian "other." These men and women created canal companies, fought Apaches, married into each other's families, voted together, and created a school for their children - all with little regard to race. Civil law and U.S. homestead laws fostered Mexican-American women's land ownership. Conflicts over water rights cleaved the community, but not along racial or gendered lines. It was a world of possibility.
Rural American
Families
Co-Sponsored
by The Newberry Library, The University of Chicago, and Trinity Christian
College
Saturday, April 29, 2006, 11:00am-3:00pm
Admission is free, pre-registration is required. To register and receive copies of the papers, e-Mail scholl@newberry.org, or call 312.255.3524.
The following papers will be pre-circulated and discussed at the seminar:
The Farm Woman and Modernity,
1900-1935
Janet Galligani Casey, Skidmore College
This paper presents the farmer's wife as a figure upon whom important modern anxieties converged, considering the various ways that the Farm Woman as cultural trope was situated within normative models of women as re/productive workers and as consumers. It also makes use of letters and survey responses from the period to illustrate the efforts of rural women to negotiate cultural claims on their bodies and identities. Ultimately it reveals how the farm woman's excessive signification in terms of class, labor, and American identity made her role(s) a hotly contested issue both inside and outside of agrarian contexts.
Trapped in the Country: The Plight of
Rural Orphans in Nineteenth Century America
Megan Birk, Purdue
University
Dependent children in rural areas, living in what many believed to be the ultimate in healthy environments, found themselves at the mercy of an underdeveloped social welfare system pieced together with mixed results. Rural counties struggled to find good methods to care for dependent children and administrators utilized a small tax base to support dependent children. However, small populations did not necessarily reflect small numbers of children needing care. Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio established this decentralized county system and tried a wide variety of care practices resulting in children living in poor farms, county orphans' homes, privately funded orphans' homes, and "foster" homes. The examination of how this system functioned provides a glimpse into an untapped dynamic of rural life and a new viewpoint to examine the development of social welfare.
Midwestern Farm Families and Poverty: A
Preliminary Examination
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Iowa State
University
Although poverty was a common condition among farming families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most reformers did not consider it a pressing social problem. Many assumed that poverty in rural communities could be ameliorated by kin and neighbors, and families would be able to solve their own economic dilemmas. Rural poverty, however, proved to be stubborn, and rural communities and states struggled to provide home-grown solutions with the devlopment of poor funds, poor farms, and child welfare institutions. These efforts illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of anti-poverty programs begun in the era before the Great Depression and New Deal.
The seminar format assumes that all participants have read the essay in advance, and that all those requesting the paper will attend the seminar. Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend. We encourage faculty members to call the seminar to the attention of graduate students.