Within the frame of family farming, this book offers a longitudinal study of the Castra district in North-West Tasmania from first European settlement to the end of the twentieth century. It draws upon historical sources for yeomanry characteristics from Britain, Canada, the USA, New Zealand and Australian mainland colonies to show how these characteristics were persistently supportive of family farming. Surveying farming communities over several generations, this book explores a range of topics including colonial surveying practices, settler families’ motivation, attributes and demographics, the role of Methodism, the ways children were inculcated into yeoman farming enterprises, the role of women as companionate wives and the political participation of farmers in the public sphere. The book also offers a new perspective of three commonly held myths of settlement failure: the settlement of retired Anglo-Indian military and civil officers in the 1870s, the settlement of soldiers on small farms after the Great War and the claims that the ideal of yeoman family farming was anachronistic to capitalist commodity production. The book draws from a wide selection of previously underused primary source materials, including oral histories from current and past residents, to provide a comprehensive overview of an important aspect of rural Australian history. The book is a valuable contribution to Australian historiography, and will be a useful resource for students and scholars of rural history, social history, environmental history, colonialism and sustainable agriculture.

In From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, Stephen A. West revises understandings of the American South by offering a new perspective on two iconic figures in the region's social landscape. "Yeoman," a term of praise for the small landowning farmer, was commonly used during the antebellum era but ultimately eclipsed by "redneck," an epithet that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. In popular use, each served less as a precise class label than as a means to celebrate or denigrate the moral and civic worth of broad groups of white men. Viewing these richly evocative figures as ideological inventions rather than sociological realities, West examines the divisions they obscured and the conflicts that gave them such force. The setting for this impressively detailed study is the Upper Piedmont of South Carolina, the sort of upcountry region typically associated with the white "plain folk." West shows how the yeoman ideal played a vital role in proslavery discourse before the Civil War but poorly captured the realities of life, with important implications for how historians understand the politics of slavery and the drive for secession. After the Civil War, the South Carolina upcountry was convulsed by the economic transformations and political conflicts out of which the redneck was born. West reinterprets key developments in the history of the New South--such as the politics of lynching and the phenomenon of the "Southern demagogue"--and uncovers the historical roots of a stereotype that continues to loom large in popular understandings of the American South. Drawing together periods and topics often treated separately, West combines economic, social, and political history in an original and compelling account.

Bolton (history, U. of Southern Mississippi) illuminates the social complexity surrounding the lives of a group consistently dismissed as rednecks, crackers, and white trash: landless white tenants and laborers in the era of slavery. A short epilogue looks at their lives today. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In Yeoman Versus Cavalier: The Old Southwest's Fictional Road to Rebellion, Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., examines the emergence of the planter-aristocrat over the yeoman as the dominant cultural icon in the newly settled states of the Old Southwest -- Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas -- during the first half of the nineteenth century. He related this region's shift in cultural ideals, as reflected in its literature, both to the coming of the Civil War and the failure of the postbellum South to reintegrate itself fully into the nation.In the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson's stalwart yeoman farmer was the mythic figure that gave the most dynamic expression to and most compelling justification for expansion to the west. This potent symbol of rural democracy was enthusiastically embraced by settlers in both midwestern and southern territories. By 1830, however, residents of the new southern states had initiated a profound imaginative movement away from the frontier myths that had linked them with midwesterners. Faced with increasingly hostile attacks on slavery and the plantation system, southerners from Virginia to Louisiana united in defense of the plantation South. Watson shows how writers of the Old Southwest reflected this cultural shift in their tendency to idealize the planter and to subvert, subordinate, or ignore the yeoman. Joining cultural and intellectual forces with the more established plantation societies of the Eastern Seaboard, these writers turned toward the Cavalier -- the noble, cultured planter of aristocratic blood and manners who, like a father, presided with wisdom and love over a large plantation -- as the primary representative of the southern way of life.Watson builds his argument by analyzing many different kinds of writing. Choosing texts that shed light on the newly evolving culture of the Old Southwest, Watson discusses the novelists William Garrott Brown, James Lane Allen, Joseph Holt Ingraham, Caroline Lee Hentz, and Augusta Jane Evans, historian Charles Gayarre, humorists Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and Thomas Bangs Thorpe, New South propagandist Henry Grady, novelist and story writer George Washington Cable, and poets Joseph Brennan and Sidney Lanier.The Cavalier ideal, Watson explains, unified the states of the Confederacy and served as a kind if icon to be carried into battle. After the war the figure was resurrected by southern writers and made an integral part of the region's Lost Cause myth, which northerners helped perpetuate. The Cavalier figure has continued to lead a vigorous life into the present century, as attested by novels such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Stark Young's So Red the Rose, and even William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!Yeoman Versus Cavalier is a solid and entertainingly written analysis of how the Cavalier, as the South's unifying mythical figure, helped shape southern history and the creation of the legend of the Old South following the Civil War. It contributes greatly to our understanding of the antebellum South and demonstrates how studying a work of literature can lead to a fuller comprehension of the culture that produced it.

Incorporating original archival research and a series of critiques of recent accounts of economic development in pre-modern England, in The Origin of Capitalism in England, 1400-1600, Spencer Dimmock has produced a challenging and multi-layered account of a historical rupture in English feudal society which led to the first sustained transition to agrarian capitalism and consequent industrial revolution. Genuinely integrating political, social and economic themes, Spencer Dimmock views capitalism broadly as a form of society rather than narrowly as an economic system. He firmly locates its beginnings with conflicting social agencies in a closely defined historical context rather than with evolutionary and transhistorical commercial developments, and will thus stimulate a thorough reappraisal of current orthodoxies on the transition to capitalism.

In this innovative study of the South Carolina Low Country, author Stephanie McCurry explores the place of the yeomanry in plantation society--the complex web of domestic and public relations within which they were enmeshed, and the contradictory politics of slave society by which that class of small farmers extracted the privileges of masterhood from the region's powerful planters. Insisting on the centrality of women as historical actors and gender as a category of analysis, this work shows how the fateful political choices made by the low-country yeomanry were rooted in the politics of the household, particularly in the customary relations of power male heads of independent households assumed over their dependents, whether slaves or free women and children. Such masterly prerogatives, practiced in the domestic sphere and redeemed in the public, explain the yeomanry's deep commitment to slavery and, ultimately, their ardent embrace of secession. By placing the yeomanry in the center of the drama, McCurry offers a significant reinterpretation of this volatile society on the road to Civil War. Through careful and creative use of a wide variety of archival sources, she brings vividly to life the small worlds of yeoman households, and the larger world of the South Carolina Low Country, the plantation South, and nineteenth-century America.