Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic

Grassroots Leviathan by Ariel Ron is a book that examines the role of agriculture in shaping the nation's formative period, challenging the myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South. It traces the rise of a powerful agricultural reform movement spurred by northern farmers and how middle-class farmers in the Greater Northeast built a movement of semipublic agricultural societies, fairs, and periodicals that recast Americans' relationship to market forces and the state.

Format: Hardback
Length: 324 pages
Publication date: 17 November 2020
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Recipient of The Center for Civil War Research's 2021 Wiley-Silver Book Prize,Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society

In this comprehensive examination of rural society from the American Revolution to the Civil War, Ariel Ron contends that agricultural history holds paramount importance in comprehending the nation's formative era. Challenging the notion that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South, Grassroots Leviathan explores the emergence of a formidable agricultural reform movement driven by northern farmers. Ron demonstrates that farming permeated the lives of most Americans for nearly the entirety of the nineteenth century, and he traces how middle-class farmers in the Greater Northeast established a movement of semipublic agricultural societies, fairs, and periodicals that fundamentally reshaped Americans' relationship with market forces and the state.

Weight: 660g
Dimension: 160 x 237 x 31 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781421439327