Review of Harvest of Dissent: Agrarianism in Nineteenth-Century New York (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful book!Summerhill's writing is clear as polished glass and his powerful narrative ability invites the reader into a nineteenth-century world rich in detail and, like the dark earth tilled by the farmers who are his subject, fertile with a harvest that in this case has grown out of research and analysis that have taken the author into sources and archival materials that have rarely if ever been looked at with such thoughtful sensitivity.It is a world full of the tensions and turbulence of social, economic and political transformation.Summerhill narrows his focus to three counties in central New York to give us an intimate view of how real people and real families coped with, made sense of, and often resisted these changes.
The book begins in the days when the ink that penned the Constitution was barely dry and some people in Delaware, Ostego and Schharie counties still told first hand stories about the War for Independence and felled trees that just a generation or two before had shaded Iroquois men and women who had recently been shoved out.It is a world, and a generation, innervated by ideals of independence, industry, liberty and the redemptive possibilities of being a stalwart member of a new and virtuous republic.Summerhill shows us that they took these ideals and responsibilities seriously, and consciously transmitted them to their children.But as the momentum of the early republic period quickens, bringing roads, canals and railroads, binding these farming families into larger commercial markets, making them increasingly dependent on capital and strengthening the relatively recent ideology of capitalism and its functionaries (large absentee land owners, banks, merchantile corporations, politicians, etc) these republican ideals often clash with the world around them.
How do these people make sense of and respond to such tensions?How do they reconcile them?When and how do they resist and rebel?How do they preserve their families and communities?How can they take advantage of change and use it to their advantage?And perhaps more fundamentally, how do they survive, feed their children and preserve their integrity as their lives are churned in the mixer of increasing industrialism and an increasingly specialized market and political economy.Summerhill's analysis of these and many others questions is as illuminating as it is entertaining.He refuses to reduce the people living in central New York to pawns or treat them as a mass.Nor does he romanticize them.Instead, he draws out the humanity of various idividuals and families to illustrate the complexity, flexibility and range of responses to show the larger journey over the course of several generations as a new kind of rural America emerges.In doing so, he ties these lives and themes into the even larger story of nineteenth-century America itself.
Summerhill offers some novel conclusions about all this, but he is not dogmatic or heavy-handed.There is enough ambiguity and he has let the men and women speak for themselves enough that the reader is left to decide for him or herself.As such, the book is not only history at its finest, it is an invitation to meditate more reflectively on how we ourselves are living our lives, and what it means to be alive, to be human, in times of change and turmoil.



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