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

Book description

How a massive agricultural reform movement led by northern farmers before the Civil War recast Americans' relationships to market forces and the state.

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 sweeping…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Grassroots Leviathan as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

A number of years ago, when I was reading through a folder of antislavery petitions at the National Archives, I found a misfiled petition asking for federal funding for an agricultural college in Iowa. Ariel Ron demonstrates how this misfiling illustrates a larger story that runs from agriculture in the early republic to the post-Civil War federal bureaucracy, through the priorities of northern farmers: improvement and justice.

Rather than an industrial behemoth, the pre-Civil War North was dominated by farmers who wanted to modernize their production and who moved from a diffuse program of reform to a campaign for federal…

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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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