At Home in the Hoosier Hills: Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810-1870 [Hardcover]

This book explores the lives and worldviews of Indiana's southern hill-country residents during much of the 19th century. Focusing on local institutions, political, economic, and religious, it gives voice to the plain farmers of the region and reveals the world as they saw it. For them, faith in local institutions reflected a distrust of distant markets and politicians. Localism saw its expression in the Democratic Party's anti-federalist strain, in economic practices such as safety-first farming which focused on taking care of the family first, and in non-perfectionist Christianity. Localism was both a means of resisting changes and the basis of a worldview that helped Hoosiers of the hill country negotiate these changes.

A history of the hill country of southern Indiana during a period of momentous change.

Richard F. Nation is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Michigan University.

[1]. Important family studies include Anya Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998); Shawn Johansen, Family Men: MiddleClass Fatherhood in Industrializing America (New York: Routledge, 2001); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988). For an overview and assessment of changing family relations in the early republic, with references to early Indiana, see Ginette Aley, Westward Expansion, John Tipton, and the Emergence of the American Midwest, 180

As for politics, southern Indiana farmers found support for their vision of egalitarianism and a localist world in the Democratic Party. Here, the multifaceted nature of hill country localism is more clearly identifiable. For example, Nation points out the complexities surrounding the Temperance movement, explaining that the issue went beyond wet versus dry. It was infused not only with moral overtones, but also with economic anxiety when it