Agricultural Records: Their Nature and Value for Research

Excerpt: Farming, together with the accompanying rurality, has been the main way of life in America until relatively recent times. Only since the World War has the urban population outnumbered the rural, and even today the total number of the latter is larger than at any previous period in the Nation’s history. The vast maze of forces and conditions that have entered into the evolution of rural life constitute, therefore, a central theme in the history of the American people, and yet far too often American history has been written by blindly groping toward this theme rather than using it as a starting point. If the analyses of the Nation’s past are to have reality, they must be derived from the basic records of this continuing ruralism, but, to use the words of Edwin F. Gay, "Common use and wont is one of the greatest enemies of the historical record; for ordinarily those gradual, day-by-day changes in attitude of mind in which multitudes participate are not observed and recorded." Granted this fact, attention must be given to the existing records that lie closest to the multitude of social and economic processes centering in agriculture. For purposes of discussion, these may be grouped as follows: the records originating with the individual farmer; the records of the organizations in the community to which the farmer belongs; and the records of the forces in the Nation that have reacted to mould and develop the farm and rural community.