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…

From John's list on the North during the Civil War.

If you love Grassroots Leviathan...

Book cover of The Rosewood Penny

The Rosewood Penny by J.S. Fields,

2023 Queer Indie Award Nominee!

The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.

On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…

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