4 H Club Work In The Life Of Rural Youth

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Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (95 download)

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Download or read book Cultivating Modern America written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation uses 4-H rural youth clubs as a lens for understanding what it has meant to be rural and modern in the twentieth century. By tracing the development of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's farm and home extension work with rural boys and girls from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1970s, Cultivating Modern America shows how a set of visions for the modernization of rural places, landscapes, livelihoods, and people were articulated, enacted, and contested. In particular, this dissertation shows how rural reformers positioned activities with rural youth as a means of cultivating and developing rural landscapes and rural young people simultaneously. The goal of 4-H was to create a particular form of modernity for rural places that was rooted in farming as a way of life, and distinct from urban, industrial modernization. Following 4H's processes of rural development as they played out in the American countryside, in rural areas abroad, and in cities in the postwar U.S. illuminates a strain of development thinking that has sought to guide the processes of growth and life toward improved ends. It also demonstrates how a set of ideas about agricultural improvement and rural development that sought distinctly rural solutions to rural problems came to inform national, international, and universal conceptions of development in the second half of the twentieth century. From their origins in the Progressive Era, to their emergence on the world scene in the post-WWII period, 4-H and extension work have been central to rural and national reform. By tracing the intertwined fates of cultivationist development thinking and rural modernity, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of the connections between thinking about nature and thinking about society, the role of the biological sciences in rural social thought, and the ways in which rural people and the state have cooperated to make knowledge about agriculture. 4-H club activities, and the boys and girls who carried them out, offer an important perspective on the history of modernization, agricultural change, and international development during the twentieth century.