The bicentennial edition of this publication has been revised and updated and includes an additional chapter which examines Ohio through to the end of the 20th century. George W. Knepper presents contemporary information on the national and state political arenas, the economy and the environment.

This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history. The essays cover a broad range of topics: the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's "Great Transformation."

This work has been revised and updated to include the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (2nd ed), the Dewey Decimal System Classification (21st ed) and the Library of Congress Classification Schedules. The text details the essential elements of the International Standard Bibliographic Description; introduces the associated OCLC/MARC specifications; and more. The downloadable resources give more than 500 PowerPoint slides and graphics identical to the text, in addition to scans of the title page, and title page verso and other illustrations that support examples from Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (2nd ed).

Various issues contain book reviews.