Grassroots Leviathan - (Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Libra) by Ariel Ron (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 look at rural society from the American Revolution to the Civil War, Ariel Ron argues that agricultural history is central to understanding the nation's formative period. Upending the myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South, Grassroots Leviathan traces the rise of a powerful agricultural reform movement spurred by northern farmers. Ron shows that farming dominated the lives of most Americans through almost the entire nineteenth century and traces how middle-class farmers in the "Greater Northeast" built a movement of semipublic agricultural societies, fairs, and periodicals that fundamentally recast Americans' relationship to market forces and the state.

Review Quotes

Ariel Ron's engagingly written Grassroots Leviathan is an agricultural, political, economic, and intellectual history that is also informed by soil science, chemistry, education, and legal studies.
--The Center for Civil War Research

In recovering the stakes of antebellum agricultural society, Grassroots Leviathan upends conventional wisdom about urban-rural divides in U.S. society and revives a remarkable political economic formation in which popular, democratic developmentalism successfully won out over reactionary, vested interests.
--Boston Review

About the Author

Ariel Ron is the Glenn M. Linden Associate Professor of the U.S. Civil War Era at Southern Methodist University.