Thank you for posting this. This time in history is difficult to see clearly. It helps to go back two hundred years before the Agrarians to the time of the European migration to the colonies. New England, as we still call it today, was an outpost of European aristocratic culture. The South was settled as a second migration from those who first migrated from Europe into the Northern colonies. My German and Scottish ancestors settled in the Piedmont region of North Carolina beginning in the early 1700s. Their presence can still be seen today. A third migration began when new generations of the original settlers moved West into the frontier. Industrialization in the South and West came later and continues today. A settler culture is tied to the land. The Agrarian idea was not an ideal. Not some mythic notion to inspire the spread of subsistence farming. For many people are tied to the land, it is all they have. In the late 19th century, just prior to the emergence of The Fugitive and the Agrarian perspective, Fredrick Jackson Turner declared that the frontier of the US was now settled. The frontier was closed. I believe that Lytle and his circle of scholars showed that the frontier ideal was not about settlement, but about a relationship to and with the land. The land still beckons young men and women to leave the confines of urban/suburban culture and venture out to claim their few acres of dirt. For this reason, the Southern culture they describe remains alive in fresh forms, even as industrialization ebbs and flows as an alternative culture.
Thank you for posting this. This time in history is difficult to see clearly. It helps to go back two hundred years before the Agrarians to the time of the European migration to the colonies. New England, as we still call it today, was an outpost of European aristocratic culture. The South was settled as a second migration from those who first migrated from Europe into the Northern colonies. My German and Scottish ancestors settled in the Piedmont region of North Carolina beginning in the early 1700s. Their presence can still be seen today. A third migration began when new generations of the original settlers moved West into the frontier. Industrialization in the South and West came later and continues today. A settler culture is tied to the land. The Agrarian idea was not an ideal. Not some mythic notion to inspire the spread of subsistence farming. For many people are tied to the land, it is all they have. In the late 19th century, just prior to the emergence of The Fugitive and the Agrarian perspective, Fredrick Jackson Turner declared that the frontier of the US was now settled. The frontier was closed. I believe that Lytle and his circle of scholars showed that the frontier ideal was not about settlement, but about a relationship to and with the land. The land still beckons young men and women to leave the confines of urban/suburban culture and venture out to claim their few acres of dirt. For this reason, the Southern culture they describe remains alive in fresh forms, even as industrialization ebbs and flows as an alternative culture.
Beautifully said. And a masterclass as usual.