Over the past half century, Richard Lyman Bushman has made major contributions to early New England social and political history, the history of material culture, and the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. An interest in rural life flows through his work. The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century, his most recent book, places farmers and farming at the center of the early American experience. Bushman builds on a large, contentious literature on agriculture, farmer ideology, rural uprisings, and rural capitalist development and imaginatively uses farm diaries, farm account books, tax lists, and probate records to paint the daily lives of people who farmed the mainland British colonies.
Bushman devises a familial model of farming, eliding debates about the nature of rural society. Historians disagree about farmers’ place in the Atlantic economy. They agree that farmers wanted subsistence, traded with neighbors, and vended goods...
