In August 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell University and offered him the chairmanship of the Commission on Country Life. This special commission was charged with investigating the deficiencies of contemporary rural living, as well as potential remedies for such deficiencies. Roosevelt believed that upon the farmer rested the heavy responsibility for "feeding a world which is never more than a year away from starvation," while also preserving the fertility of the soil, preventing erosion, and properly using irrigation water. After an inquiry lasting five months and involving a prodigious effort to gather data through questionnaires, public meetings, and solicited correspondence, the Report of the Country Life Commission ("the report") was submitted to the president on January 23, 1909. The burden on the farmer, the commission found, was not being met with commensurate earnings or adequate "desirability, comfort and standing of the farmer's life." While the report may be flawed in some ways, its vision of an ecologically based agriculture and a country life that could be both remunerative and richly fulfilling is regarded by present-day historians as "deeply democratic and forward looking, even prophetic." In fact, as 21st-century communities seek to foster democratic participation, to heighten understanding of the relation of people to their environment, and to build on practices that make communities more sustainable places to live, the commission's recommendations have a fresh cogency and relevance.

In March 1718, as a response to what it perceived to be rising rates in lawlessness and criminal activity, the British Parliament passed legislation which established transportation to the colonies as a punishment for a vast range of formerly capital offences. This measure, together with pre-existing arrangements for capital reprieves upon condition of transportation meant that, by the time of the Declaration of Independence, some fifty thousand convicts had been forcibly banished to North America. At least 3,420 of these were women who can be identified as having served (or been destined to serve) their sentences in Maryland (though the actual number was almost certainly much greater). The entire historiography of British convicts in colo nial America is quite small overall. In the last 120 years or so there have been three or four books on transportation, a limited number of journal articles, and a few paragraphs or pages in general histories or in those concerned with a relevant subject such as tobacco production. None of this writing has addressed the subject of women directly. Instead women have been included as a subset of principally male accounts and interpretations. This has tended to marginalize (and thus trivialize) the women's experiences. Being a particular type of indentured servant (their shippers were granted a saleable property in their labor), the convict women have also been enveloped in this larger categorization.

The Commission on Country Life established by Theodore Roosevelt submitted its report in January 1909. Its vision of a country life that could be as economically viable and genuinely fulfilling as an urban alternative is still relevant. In fact, as twenty-first-century rural communities seek to foster democratic participation while dealing with issues of agricultural sustainability and ecological realities, the commission's recommendations have an almost prophetic cogency. Yet the continuing value of the report does not mean its limitations should go unexamined. This paper reviews the commission's findings and recommendations to argue that its gender assumptions had specific outcomes for rural women. On the one hand, they influenced the gendered structure of the nationalized farm extension program established in 1914. On the other, they provoked a reaction that was a catalyst for rural women to enter directly into an ongoing debate about their roles and circumstances.

This book is about eighteenth-century women - women from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales - who committed crimes or otherwise broke the law. After their indictment, trial, and conviction, these women were punished by being transported to the American colonies, often to Maryland. The fate of these women has been largely overlooked by historians. Although their story forms only a small part of the overall narrative of American immigration, it contributes to the larger picture of unfree labor in the colonial Chesapeake. Moreover, the story of these women provides an alternative narrative to other accounts that explore the behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs of the majority population - the free and the bound - and throws these behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs into sharper relief In recent decades historical inquiries have paid heed to the lives of everyday, nonelite people, and this book is in keeping with that approach. It seeks to increase what is known about the backgrounds and the experiences of the transported convict women who, together with their male colleagues, were referred to in Maryland as "His Majesty's Seven-year Passengers" or by similar epithets indicative of derision and disdain.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the period generally designated as the Progressive Era, when educational officeholders, teacher representatives, civic activists, concerned legislators, philanthropists, and others - collectively "educational modernizers" - considered Alabama's mostly rural public schools, they were dismayed. They believed these schools, which were largely controlled by parents and local communities, did not meet contemporary standards for educational efficiency and were inadequate to the task of preparing students for a diversifying economy of industrial and commercial enterprise and an agricultural sector revolutionized by scientific farming and technology - in other words, an economy encapsulated in the term "New South." At the same time, these Progressive reformers sought to inculcate in students a broad sense of southern identity, believing that it would provide them with the fundamental civic values needed to address the challenges of the new century.